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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
+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: Bride of the Mistletoe
+
+Author: James Lane Allen
+
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9179]
+This file was first posted on September 11, 2003
+Last Updated: October 30, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE
+
+By James Lane Allen
+
+
+
+Author Of “Flute And Violin,” “A Kentucky Cardinal,” “Aftermath,” Etc.
+
+
+
+TO ONE WHO KNOWS
+
+
+Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raissoner.  Mais il
+faut regarder beaucoup et songer à ce qu’on a vu.  Voir: tout est là,
+et voir juste. J’entends, par voir juste, voir avec ses propres yeux
+et non avec ceux des maîtres.  L’originalité d’un artiste s’indique
+d’abord dans les petites choses et non dans les grandes.
+
+Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n’a pas encore
+découverte et tâcher de l’exprimer d’une façon personelle.
+
+--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Any one about to read this work of fiction might properly be apprised
+beforehand that it is not a novel: it has neither the structure nor
+the purpose of The Novel.
+
+It is a story. There are two characters--a middle-aged married couple
+living in a plain farmhouse; one point on the field of human nature is
+located; at that point one subject is treated; in the treatment one
+movement is directed toward one climax; no external event whatsoever
+is introduced; and the time is about forty hours.
+
+A second story of equal length, laid in the same house, is expected to
+appear within a twelvemonth. The same father and mother are
+characters, and the family friend the country doctor; but
+subordinately all. The main story concerns itself with the four
+children of the two households.
+
+It is an American children’s story:
+
+“A Brood of The Eagle.”
+
+During the year a third work, not fiction, will be published,
+entitled:
+
+“The Christmas Tree: An Interpretation.”
+
+The three works will serve to complete each other, and they complete a
+cycle of the theme.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+       EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+
+    I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+
+   II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+
+  III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+
+   IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+
+    V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+
+   VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+
+
+
+
+EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+
+
+A mighty table-land lies southward in a hardy region of our country.
+It has the form of a colossal Shield, lacking and broken in some of
+its outlines and rough and rude of make. Nature forged it for some
+crisis in her long warfare of time and change, made use of it, and so
+left it lying as one of her ancient battle-pieces--Kentucky.
+
+The great Shield is raised high out of the earth at one end and sunk
+deep into it at the other. It is tilted away from the dawn toward the
+sunset.  Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet, Nature,
+cunning artificer, set the stream of ocean flowing past with restless
+foam--the Father of Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound a
+bright river to the rim of silver. And where the eastern part rises
+loftiest on the horizon, turned away from the reddening daybreak, she
+piled shaggy mountains wooded with trees that loose their leaves ere
+snowflakes fly and with steadfast evergreens which hold to theirs
+through the gladdening and the saddening year. Then crosswise over the
+middle of the Shield, northward and southward upon the breadth of it,
+covering the life-born rock of many thicknesses, she drew a tough skin
+of verdure--a broad strip of hide of the ever growing grass. She
+embossed noble forests on this greensward and under the forests drew
+clear waters.
+
+This she did in a time of which we know nothing--uncharted ages before
+man had emerged from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder, thoughts
+to wander, heart to love, and spirit to pray. Many a scene the same
+power has wrought out upon the surface of the Shield since she brought
+him forth and set him there: many an old one, many a new. She has made
+it sometimes a Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace.  Nor has
+she yet finished with its destinies as she has not yet finished with
+anything in the universe.  While therefore she continues her will and
+pleasure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not forget the
+Shield.
+
+She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which admonish man how
+little his lot has changed since Hephaistos wrought like scenes upon
+the shield of Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like a
+falcon from snowy Olympus bearing the glittering piece of armor to her
+angered son.
+
+These are some of the scenes that were wrought on the shield of
+Achilles and that to-day are spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky:
+
+Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze of lights as they lead the
+bride from her chamber, flutes and violins sounding merrily. An
+assembly-place where the people are gathered, a strife having arisen
+about the blood-price of a man slain; the old lawyers stand up one
+after another and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, freshly
+ploughed fields where ploughmen drive their teams to and fro, the
+earth growing dark behind the share. The estate of a landowner where
+laborers are reaping; some armfuls the binders are binding with
+twisted bands of straw: among them the farmer is standing in silence,
+leaning on his staff, rejoicing in his heart. Vineyards with purpling
+clusters and happy folk gathering these in plaited baskets on sunny
+afternoons.  A herd of cattle with incurved horns hurrying from the
+stable to the woods where there is running water and where
+purple-topped weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen with white
+sheep. A dancing-place under the trees; girls and young men dancing,
+their fingers on one another’s wrists: a great company stands watching
+the lovely dance of joy.
+
+Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles as art; as pageants
+of life they appear on the Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker of
+old wrought them upon the armor of the Greek warrior in tin and
+silver, bronze and gold. The world-designer sets them to-day on the
+throbbing land in nerve and blood, toil and delight and passion. But
+there with the old things she mingles new things, with the never
+changing the ever changing; for the old that remains always the new
+and the new that perpetually becomes old--these Nature allots to man
+as his two portions wherewith he must abide steadfast in what he is
+and go upward or go downward through all that he is to become.
+
+But of the many scenes which she in our time sets forth upon the
+stately grassy Shield there is a single spectacle that she spreads
+over the length and breadth of it once every year now as best liked by
+the entire people; and this is both old and new.
+
+It is old because it contains man’s faith in his immortality, which
+was venerable with age before the shield of Achilles ever grew
+effulgent before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new because it
+contains those latest hopes and reasons for this faith, which briefly
+blossom out upon the primitive stock with the altering years and soon
+are blown away upon the winds of change. Since this spectacle, this
+festival, is thus old and is thus new and thus enwraps the deepest
+thing in the human spirit, it is never forgotten.
+
+When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or sows in the teeth of the
+wind and glances at the fickle sky; when under the summer shade of a
+flowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted herds and fattening
+grain; whether there is autumnal plenty in his barn or autumnal
+emptiness, autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal strife,--all days
+of the year, in the assembly-place, in the dancing-place, whatsoever
+of good or ill befall in mind or hand, never does one forget.
+
+When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seems
+farthest from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when the
+fields lie shorn between harvest-time and seed-time and man turns
+wistful eyes back and forth between the mystery of his origin and the
+mystery of his end,--then comes the great pageant of the winter
+solstice, then comes Christmas.
+
+So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differing
+but always identical mortals?
+
+It was once the old pagan festival of dead Nature. It was once the old
+pagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival when
+the hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It was
+the pagan festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants of
+an upper world upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, and
+the production of a race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is now
+the festival of the Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortal
+children. It is now the new festival of man’s remembrance of his
+errors and his charity toward erring neighbors. It has latterly become
+the widening festival of universal brotherhood with succor for all
+need and nighness to all suffering; of good will warring against ill
+will and of peace warring upon war.
+
+And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the
+festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it
+is on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an
+age to many people--the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen;
+setting forth man’s pathetic love of youth--of his own youth that will
+not stay with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds its
+ancient way upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light.
+
+This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield.
+
+
+
+
+I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+
+
+A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country a
+few years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
+
+One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the desk
+near his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing and
+turned the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of his
+mental travels--for such he followed--was now passing through the
+evergreens.
+
+Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned there
+like short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths and
+customs of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper,
+as gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the large
+one.  It dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the
+class of those that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which
+possess them as unsafe reading for unsafe minds.
+
+Sheets of paper covered with the man’s clear, deliberate handwriting
+lay thickly on the desk.  A table in the centre of the room was strewn
+with volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On the
+tops of two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representing
+scenes from the oldest known art of the East. These and other prints
+hanging about the walls, however remote from each other in the times
+and places where they had been gathered, brought together in this room
+of a quiet Kentucky farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object:
+the subject related in general to trees and in especial evergreens.
+
+While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to be
+submerged. His left hand was always going out to one or the other of
+three picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly.
+
+Two of these frames held photographs of four young children--a boy and
+a girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being well
+enough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unruly
+and disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of them
+looked straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American frankness
+and good humor; all had mouths shut tight with American energy and
+determination. Apparently they already believed that the New World was
+behind them, that the nation backed them up. In a way you believed
+it. You accepted them on the spot as embodying that marvellous
+precocity in American children, through which they early in life
+become conscious of the country and claim it their country and believe
+that it claims them. Thus they took on the distinction of being a
+squad detached only photographically from the rank and file of the
+white armies of the young in the New World, millions and millions
+strong, as they march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous, magnificent,
+toward new times and new destinies for the nation and for humanity--a
+kinder knowledge of man and a kinder ignorance of God.
+
+The third frame held the picture of a woman probably thirty years of
+age. Her features were without noticeable American characteristics.
+What human traits you saw depended upon what human traits you saw
+with.
+
+The hair was dark and abundant, the brows dark and strong. And the
+lashes were dark and strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornily
+hedged about, somehow brought up before you a picture of autumn
+thistles--thistles that look out from the shadow of a rock. They had a
+veritable thistle quality and suggestiveness: gray and of the fields,
+sure of their experience in nature, freighted with silence.
+
+Despite grayness and thorniness, however, you saw that they were in
+the summer of their life-bloom; and singularly above even their beauty
+of blooming they held what is rare in the eyes of either men or
+women--they held a look of being just.
+
+The whole face was an oval, long, regular, high-bred. If the lower
+part had been hidden behind a white veil of the Orient (by that little
+bank of snow which is guardedly built in front of the overflowing
+desires of the mouth), the upper part would have given the impression
+of reserve, coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that one
+look--the garnered wisdom, the tempering justice, of the eyes. The
+whole face being seen, the lower features altered the impression made
+by the upper ones; reserve became bettered into strength, coldness
+bettered into dignity, severity of intellect transfused into glowing
+nobleness of character. The look of virgin justice in her was perhaps
+what had survived from that white light of life which falls upon young
+children as from a receding sun and touches lingeringly their smiles
+and glances; but her mouth had gathered its shadowy tenderness as she
+walked the furrows of the years, watching their changeful harvests,
+eating their passing bread.
+
+A handful of some of the green things of winter lay before her
+picture: holly boughs with their bold, upright red berries; a spray of
+the cedar of the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous blue. When
+he had come in from out of doors to go on with his work, he had put
+them there--perhaps as some tribute. After all his years with her,
+many and strong, he must have acquired various tributes and
+interpretations; but to-day, during his walk in the woods, it had
+befallen him to think of her as holly which ripens amid snows and
+retains its brave freshness on a landscape of departed things. As
+cedar also which everywhere on the Shield is the best loved of
+forest-growths to be the companion of household walls; so that even
+the poorest of the people, if it does not grow near the spot they
+build in, hunt for it and bring it home: everywhere wife and cedar,
+wife and cedar, wife and cedar.
+
+The photographs of the children grouped on each side of hers with
+heads a little lower down called up memories of Old World pictures in
+which cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet of the heavenly Hebrew
+maid. Glowing young American mother with four healthy children as her
+gifts to the nation--this was the practical thought of her that
+riveted and held.
+
+As has been said, they were in two groups, the children; a boy and
+girl in each. The four were of nearly the same age; but the faces of
+two were on a dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced at her again
+and persuaded yourself that the expression of motherhood which
+characterized her separated into two expressions (as behind a thin
+white cloud it is possible to watch another cloud of darker
+hue). Nearer in time was the countenance of a mother happy with happy
+offspring; further away the same countenance withdrawn a little into
+shadow--the face of the mother bereaved--mute and changeless.
+
+The man, the worker, whom this little flock of wife and two surviving
+children now followed through the world as their leader, sat with his
+face toward his desk In a corner of the room; solidly squared before
+his undertaking, liking it, mastering it; seldom changing his position
+as the minutes passed, never nervously; with a quietude in him that
+was oftener in Southern gentlemen in quieter, more gentlemanly
+times. A low powerful figure with a pair of thick shoulders and
+tremendous limbs; filling the room with his vitality as a heavy
+passionate animal lying in a corner of a cage fills the space of the
+cage, so that you wait for it to roll over or get up on its feet and
+walk about that you may study its markings and get an inkling of its
+conquering nature.
+
+Meantime there were hints of him. When he had come in, he had thrown
+his overcoat on a chair that stood near the table in the centre of the
+room and had dropped his hat upon his coat.  It had slipped to the
+floor and now lay there--a low, soft black hat of a kind formerly much
+worn by young Southerners of the countryside,--especially on occasions
+when there was a spur of heat in their mood and going,--much the same
+kind that one sees on the heads of students in Rome in winter; light,
+warm, shaping itself readily to breezes from any quarter, to be doffed
+or donned as comfortable and negligible. It suggested that he had been
+a country boy in the land, still belonged to the land, and as a man
+kept to its out-of-door habits and fashions. His shoes, one of which
+you saw at each side of his chair, were especially well made for
+rough-going feet to tramp in during all weathers.
+
+A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped to withdraw your
+interpretation of him from farm life to the arts or the
+professions. The scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing against
+the clear-hued flesh at the back of his neck, and the Van Dyck-like
+edge of the shirt cuff, defining his powerful wrist and hand,
+strengthened the notion that he belonged to the arts or to the
+professions. He might have been sitting before a canvas instead of a
+desk and holding a brush instead of a pen: the picture would have been
+true to life. Or truer yet, he might have taken his place with the
+grave group of students in the Lesson in Anatomy left by Rembrandt.
+
+Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair about, and began to read
+the page he had just finished: then you saw him. He had a big,
+masculine, solid-cut, self-respecting, normal-looking, executive
+head--covered with thick yellowish hair clipped short; so that while
+everything else in his appearance indicated that he was in the prime
+of manhood, the clipped hair caused him to appear still more youthful;
+and it invested him with a rustic atmosphere which went along very
+naturally with the sentimental country hat and the all-weather
+shoes. He seemed at first impression a magnificent animal frankly
+loved of the sun--perhaps too warmly. The sun itself seemed to have
+colored for him his beard and mustache--a characteristic hue of men’s
+hair and beard in this land peopled from Old English stock. The beard,
+like the hair, was cut short, as though his idea might have been to
+get both hair and beard out of life’s daily way; but his mustache
+curled thickly down over his mouth, hiding it. In the whole effect
+there was a suggestion of the Continent, perhaps of a former student
+career in Germany, memories of which may still have lasted with him
+and the marks of which may have purposely been kept up in his
+appearance.
+
+But such a fashion of beard, while covering a man’s face, does much to
+uncover the man. As he sat amid his papers and books, your thought
+surely led again to old pictures where earnest heads bend together
+over some point on the human road, at which knowledge widens and
+suffering begins to be made more bearable and death more
+kind. Perforce now you interpreted him and fixed his general working
+category: that he was absorbed in work meant to be serviceable to
+humanity. His house, the members of his family, the people of his
+neighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere dweller on
+his farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the race
+forever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows.
+
+He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped its
+responsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests.
+The look of the student left his face; over it began to play the soft
+lights of the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for his
+own place in the world; the student had become the husband and
+house-father. A few moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his work
+again, his right hand took up the pen, his left hand went back to the
+pictures.
+
+The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he were
+being watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed.
+(He had the reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that he
+is idolized.)
+
+Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immense
+oak tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminder
+of vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, the
+straining and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcries
+for the wild life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, an
+image of forest reflection.  Once a small black-and-white sapsucker,
+circling the trunk and peering into the crevices of the bark on a
+level with the windows, uttered minute notes which penetrated into the
+room like steel darts of sound. A snowbird alighted on the
+window-sill, glanced familiarly in at the man, and shot up its crest;
+but disappointed perhaps that it was not noticed, quoted its resigned
+gray phrase--a phrase it had made for itself to accompany the score of
+gray whiter--and flitted on billowy wings to a juniper at the corner
+of the house, its turret against the long javelins of the North.
+
+Amid the stillness of Nature outside and the house-silence of a love
+guarding him within, the man worked on.
+
+A little clock ticked independently on the old-fashioned Parian marble
+mantelpiece. Prints were propped against its sides and face,
+illustrating the use of trees about ancient tombs and temples.  Out of
+this photographic grove of dead things the uncaring clock threw out
+upon the air a living three--the fateful three that had been measured
+for each tomb and temple in its own land and time.
+
+A knock, regretful but positive, was heard, and the door opening into
+the hall was quietly pushed open. A glow lit up the student’s face
+though he did not stop writing; and his voice, while it gave a
+welcome, unconsciously expressed regret at being disturbed:
+
+“Come in.”
+
+“I am in!”
+
+He lifted his heavy figure with instant courtesy--rather obsolete
+now--and bowing to one side, sat down again.
+
+“So I see,” he said, dipping his pen into his ink.
+
+“Since you did not turn around, you would better have said ‘So I
+hear.’ It is three o’clock.”
+
+“So I hear.”
+
+“You said you would be ready.”
+
+“I am ready.”
+
+“You said you would be done.”
+
+“I am done--nearly done.”
+
+“How nearly?”
+
+“By to-morrow--to-morrow afternoon before dark. I have reached the
+end, but now it is hard to stop, hard to let go.”
+
+His tone gave first place, primary consideration, to his work. The
+silence in the room suddenly became charged. When the voice was heard
+again, there was constraint in it:
+
+“There is something to be done this afternoon before dark, something I
+have a share in. Having a share, I am interested. Being interested, I
+am prompt. Being prompt, I am here.”
+
+He waved his hand over the written sheets before him--those cold Alps
+of learning; and asked reproachfully:
+
+“Are you not interested in all this, O you of little faith?”
+
+“How can I say, O me of little knowledge!”
+
+As the words impulsively escaped, he heard a quick movement behind
+him. He widened out his heavy arms upon his manuscript and looked back
+over his shoulder at her and laughed. And still smiling and holding
+his pen between his fingers, he turned and faced her. She had advanced
+into the middle of the room and had stopped at the chair on which he
+had thrown his overcoat and hat. She had picked up the hat and stood
+turning it and pushing its soft material back into shape for his
+head--without looking at him.
+
+The northern light of the winter afternoon, entering through the
+looped crimson-damask curtains, fell sidewise upon the woman of the
+picture.
+
+Years had passed since the picture had been made. There were changes
+in her; she looked younger. She had effaced the ravages of a sadder
+period of her life as human voyagers upon reaching quiet port repair
+the damages of wandering and storm. Even the look of motherhood, of
+the two motherhoods, which so characterized her in the photograph, had
+disappeared for the present.  Seeing her now for the first time, one
+would have said that her whole mood and bearing made a single
+declaration: she was neither wife nor mother; she was a woman in love
+with life’s youth--with youth--youth; in love with the things that
+youth alone could ever secure to her.
+
+The carriage of her beautiful head, brave and buoyant, brought before
+you a vision of growing things in nature as they move towards their
+summer yet far away. There still was youth in the round white throat
+above the collar of green velvet--woodland green--darker than the
+green of the cloth she wore. You were glad she had chosen that color
+because she was going for a walk with him; and green would enchain the
+eye out on the sere ground and under the stripped trees. The
+flecklessness of her long gloves drew your thoughts to winter
+rather--to its one beauteous gift dropped from soiled clouds. A
+slender toque brought out the keenness in the oval of her face.  From
+it rose one backward-sweeping feather of green shaded to coral at the
+tip; and there your fancy may have cared to see lingering the last
+radiance of whiter-sunset skies.
+
+He kept his seat with his back to the manuscript from which he had
+repulsed her; and his eyes swept loyally over her as she
+waited. Though she could scarcely trust herself to speak, still less
+could she endure the silence. With her face turned toward the windows
+opening on the lawn, she stretched out her arm toward him and softly
+shook his hat at him.
+
+“The sun sets--you remember how many minutes after four,” she said,
+with no other tone than that of quiet warning. “I marked the minutes
+in the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone to
+bed, so that you would not forget. You know how short the twilights
+are even when the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will not
+be any twilight. The children said they would not be at home until
+after dark, but they may come sooner; it may be a trick. They have
+threatened to catch us this year in one way or another, and you know
+they must not do that--not this year! There must be one more Christmas
+with all its old ways--even if it must be without its old mysteries.”
+
+He did not reply at once and then not relevantly:
+
+“I heard you playing.”
+
+He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under his
+brows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for she
+held her face averted.
+
+The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater
+constraint in her voice when it was next heard:
+
+“I had to play; you need not have listened.”
+
+“I had to listen; you played loud--”
+
+“I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown
+other sounds,” she admitted.
+
+“What other sounds?” His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it
+was a frank thrust into the unknown.
+
+“Discords--possibly.”
+
+“What discords?” His thrust became deeper.
+
+She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across
+her lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish.
+
+But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hidden
+trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished,
+radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a
+blaze of sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the
+advancing Figure of Joy.
+
+It was the whole familiar picture of him now--triumphantly painted in
+the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords--that
+drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the
+self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near
+losing; and her words issued from behind the closed gates--as through
+a crevice of the closed gates:
+
+“I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep
+grave ones you sent for.  It is written by a deep grave German, and it
+is worked out in the deep grave German way.  The whole purpose of it
+is to show that any woman in the life of any man is merely--an
+Incident.  She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a
+briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, at
+bottom, she is to him--an Incident.”
+
+He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened.
+
+“Were those the discords?” he asked gently.
+
+She did not reply.
+
+He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised
+his arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of
+magazines on top of his desk.
+
+“Here is a work,” he said, “not written by a German or by any other
+man, but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole
+purpose of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the
+life of any woman.  He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for
+a briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end,
+beneath everything else, he is to her--an Incident.”
+
+He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his
+eyes.
+
+“That did not trouble me,” he said tenderly.  “Those were not discords
+to me.”
+
+Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no
+comment.
+
+His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to
+whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he
+turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself
+from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness:
+
+“Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a year
+now I have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and at
+this work--without any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurred
+before in our lives. You have shared everything. I have relied upon
+you and I have needed you, and you have never failed me. And this
+apparently has been your reward--to be rudely shut out at last.  Now
+you come in and I tell you that the work is done--quite
+finished--without a word to you about it. Do I not understand?” he
+repeated.  “Have I not understood all along? It is true; outwardly as
+regards this work you have been--the Incident.”
+
+As he paused, she made a slight gesture with one hand as though she
+did not care for what he was saying and brushed away the fragile web
+of his words from before her eyes--eyes fixed on larger things lying
+clear before her in life’s distance.
+
+He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:
+
+“But, comrade of all these years, battler with me for life’s
+victories, did you think you were never to know? Did you believe I was
+never to explain? You had only one more day to wait!  If patience, if
+faith, could only have lasted another twenty-four hours--until
+Christmas Eve!”
+
+It was the first time for nearly a year that the sound of those words
+had been heard in that house.  He bent earnestly over toward her; he
+leaned heavily forward with his hands on his knees and searched her
+features with loyal chiding.
+
+“Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?” he asked, “its secrets for you
+and me? Think of Christmas Eve for you and me! Remember!”
+
+Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a
+woodchopper’s smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about
+the hidden life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmosphere
+near by is clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender
+haze of old pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred.
+
+He noted the effect of his words and did not wait. He turned to his
+desk and, gathering up the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to
+cover her picture with them.
+
+“Stay blinded and bewildered there,” he said, “until the hour comes
+when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand;
+you will then see whether in this work you have been--the Incident.”
+
+Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter
+afternoon had perceptibly waned in the room.
+
+She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were
+tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up
+between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.
+
+“It is getting late,” she said in nearly the same tone of quiet
+warning with which she had spoken before. “There is no time to lose.”
+
+He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its
+interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of
+her arms, looking at her reverently.
+
+But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides--the
+hands that were life, the arms that were love.
+
+She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward
+over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache.
+Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly
+on his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put
+out one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile
+over her shoulder to him:
+
+“Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?” she asked,
+with a struggling sweetness in her voice.
+
+He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve
+with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the
+collar:
+
+“I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books.”
+
+“The trouble is,” she replied, “the trouble is that the authors are
+right and the books are right: men and women _are_ only Incidents
+to each other in life,” and she passed out into the hall.
+
+“Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the
+universe,” he replied, “if we cared to look at it in that way; but
+we’d better not!”
+
+He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly
+stopped buttoning his overcoat.  His eyes began to wander over the
+books, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey
+everything that he had brought together from such distances of place
+and time. His work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of
+loneliness, came over him as it comes upon all of us who reach the
+happy ending of toil that we have put our heart and strength in.
+
+“Are you coming?” she called faintly from the hall.
+
+“I am coming,” he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he
+stopped again and looked back.
+
+Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was
+on the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers
+who join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment
+that through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which
+men--like a crew of sailors--tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow
+her into some divine haven.
+
+His task was ended. Would it be of service?  Would it carry any
+message? Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth,
+with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable
+children of the future the better for its shining?
+
+“Are you coming?” she called more quiveringly.
+
+“I am coming,” he called back, breaking away from his revery, and
+raising his voice so it would surely reach her.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+
+
+She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the
+short frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting
+to be joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed
+on the doorway for his emerging figure.
+
+“To-morrow night,” he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his
+words, “to-morrow night you will understand.”
+
+“Yes,” she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers,
+“to-morrow night I must understand.  Until to-morrow night, then,
+blinded and bewildered with holly and cedar let me be!  Kind
+ignorance, enfold me and spare me! All happiness that I can control or
+conjecture, come to me and console me!”
+
+And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he
+should step forth.
+
+It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what
+they had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind,
+and the whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no
+movement. Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the
+winter land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
+
+The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and
+beyond the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the
+distance you distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-grass
+pastures: white ash and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut
+and black walnut; and the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the
+sycamore with her soft leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the
+hickory brought to mind autumn days when children were abroad,
+ploughing the myriad leaves with booted feet and gathering their
+harvest of nuts--primitive food-storing instinct of the human animal
+still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts to be put away in garret
+and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas came.
+
+Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of
+an axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it
+would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of
+the forest mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be
+gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house.  Near by was a thicket
+of bramble and cane where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly
+thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.
+
+Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield.  The corn had just
+been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears
+ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly
+to remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a
+genial torrent through all days and nights of the year--many a
+full-throated rill--but never with so inundating a movement as at this
+season.  And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all
+farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on
+posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black
+rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor
+over well-chosen chips.
+
+Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled,
+rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.
+
+On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble
+of which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness
+for the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the
+drills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn
+aftermath.
+
+Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where
+hemp-breakers were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks
+wagons loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to
+the towns, helping to fill the farmer’s pockets with holiday largess.
+
+Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the
+mistletoe--the holly--the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty
+men--the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives--the turkey
+and the quail--and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sight
+there--the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into
+offerings to the dark solstice, the low activities of the soil
+uplifted to human joyance.
+
+One last thing completed the picture of the scene.
+
+The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day
+and lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive
+verdure.  Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor
+larch nor fir is native to these portions of the Shield; only the wild
+cedar, the shapeless and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage
+of evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had
+been planted.
+
+It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their note
+of deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape
+this dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky they
+waited in beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and spruce
+which seems always to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; the
+dim blue-gray of pines which rather belongs to far-vaulted summer
+skies; and the dark green of firs--true comfortable winter coat when
+snows sift mournfully and icicles are spearing earthward.
+
+These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished the
+picture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied
+no appetite, they were ministers to no passions; but with them the
+Christmas of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape their
+boughs with its gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires the
+spiritual hope of humanity would take its flight toward the eternal.
+
+Thus then the winter land waited for the oncoming of that strange
+travelling festival of the world which has roved into it and encamped
+gypsy-like from old lost countries: the festival that takes toll of
+field and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup and loaf; but that, best of
+all, wrings from the nature of man its reluctant tenderness for his
+fellows and builds out of his lonely doubts regarding this life his
+faith in a better one.
+
+And central on this whole silent scene--the highest element in it--its
+one winter-red passion flower--the motionless woman waiting outside
+the house.
+
+At last he came out upon the step.
+
+He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though his first thought were
+of what the weather was going to be. Then as he buttoned the top
+button of his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down over it to
+make it more comfortable under his short neck, with his other hand he
+gave a little pull at his hat--the romantic country hat; and he peeped
+out from under the rustic brim at her, smiling with old gayeties and
+old fondnesses. He bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked so
+short under the flat headgear that her first thought was how slight a
+disguise every year turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and she
+smiled back at him with the same gayeties and fondnesses of days gone
+by. But such a deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and walked
+hurriedly down the hill toward the evergreens.
+
+He was quickly at her side. She could feel how animal youth in him
+released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was
+brutal vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as
+his overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping
+out of life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down
+the lawn he halted and laid his hand heavily on her wrist.
+
+“Listen to that!” he said. His voice was eager, excited, like a boy’s.
+
+On the opposite side of the house, several hundred yards away, the
+country turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them the
+rumbling of many vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of the
+nearest town and moving toward smaller villages scattered over the
+country; to its hamlets and cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer
+or poorer--every vehicle Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of the
+Southern Yule-tide. There were matters and usages in those American
+carriages and buggies and wagons and carts the history of which went
+back to the England of the Georges and the Stuarts and the Henrys; to
+the England of Elizabeth, to the England of Chaucer; back through
+robuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred, and on beyond
+this till they were lost under the forest glooms of Druidical Britain.
+
+They stood looking into each other’s eyes and gathering into their
+ears the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it all
+meant--this far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they saw
+the whole picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: the
+atmosphere of it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouring
+from its chimneys, so that twilight in it had already begun to fall
+ahead of twilight out in the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along
+the little streets, and shops to be illuminated to the delight of
+window-gazing, mystery-loving children--wild with their holiday
+excitements and secrecies.  Somewhere in the throng their own two
+children were busy unless they had already started home.
+
+For years he had held a professorship in the college in this town,
+driving in and out from his home; but with the close of this academic
+year he was to join the slender file of Southern men who have been
+called to Northern universities: this change would mean the end of
+life here. Both thought of this now--of the last Christmas in the
+house; and with the same impulse they turned their gaze back to it.
+
+More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield, a
+writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its
+meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of
+an entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue,
+he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into
+the notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world
+knows it--the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of
+American home life--embodying the very soul of it in the clear amber
+of sound.
+
+This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low,
+old-fashioned, brown-walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneys
+generous, with green window-shutters less than green and white
+window-sills less than white; with feudal vines giving to its walls
+their summery allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in the
+middle years of its strength and its honors; not needy, not wealthy,
+but answering Agar’s prayer for neither poverty nor riches.
+
+The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it.
+
+It had been the house of his fathers. He had brought her to it as his
+own on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across the
+country. They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him in
+the carriage, one of his arms around her and his other hand enfolding
+both of hers, she had first caught sight of it through the forest
+trees--waiting for her with its lights just lit, its warmth, its
+privacies: and that had been Christmas Eve!
+
+For her wedding day had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her
+choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she
+had clung to it the more positively.
+
+“It is the most beautiful night of the year!”  she had replied,
+brushing their objection aside with that reason alone. “And it is the
+happiest!  I will be married on that night, when I am happiest!”
+
+Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered other words to
+herself--yet scarce uttered them, rather felt them:
+
+“Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannot
+fail us became human.  My love for him, which is the divine thing in
+my life and which is never to fail him, shall become human to him on
+that night.”
+
+When the carriage had stopped at the front porch, he had led her into
+the house between the proud smiling servants of his establishment
+ranged at a respectful distance on each side; and without surrendering
+her even to her maid--a new spirit of silence on him--he had led her
+to her bedroom, to a place on the carpet under the chandelier.
+
+Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in
+her youth and loveliness--_for him;_ come into his house, into
+his arms--_his_; no other’s--never while life lasted to be
+another’s even in thought or in desire.
+
+Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of
+many had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could
+gather her home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms
+and set upon her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As
+his warm breath broke close against her face, his lips under their
+mustache, almost boyish then, had thoughtlessly formed one little
+phrase--one little but most lasting and fateful phrase:
+
+“_Bride of the Mistletoe_!”
+
+Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of
+mistletoe swung from the chandelier.
+
+Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards
+know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as
+the first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them
+most clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow
+down into the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon
+the life-sap of the tree. And in all the later years they had been the
+green spot of verdure under life’s dark skies--the undying bough into
+which the spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world:
+
+“_Bride of the Mistletoe!_”
+
+Through the first problem of learning to weld her nature to his
+wisely; through the perils of bearing children and the agony of seeing
+some of them pass away; through the ambition of having him rise in his
+profession and through the ideal of making his home an earthly
+paradise; through loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he came
+back,--upon her whole life had rested the wintry benediction of that
+mystical phrase:
+
+“_Bride of the Mistletoe!_”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She turned away now, starting once more downward toward the
+evergreens. He was quickly at her side.
+
+“What do you suppose Harold and Elizabeth are up to about this time?”
+ he asked, with a good-humored jerk of his head toward the distant
+town.
+
+“At least to something mischievous, whatever it is,” she
+replied. “They begged to be allowed to stay until the shop windows
+were lighted; they have seen the shop windows two or three times
+already this week: there is no great marvel for them now in shop
+windows. Permission to stay late may be a blind to come home
+early. They are determined, from what I have overheard, to put an end
+this year to the parental house mysteries of Christmas. They are
+crossing the boundary between the first childhood and the second. But
+if it be possible, I wish everything to be kept once more just as it
+has always been; let it be so for my sake!”
+
+“And I wish it for your sake,” he replied heartily; “and for my
+purposes.”
+
+After a moment of silence he asked: “How large a Tree must it be this
+year?”
+
+“It will have to be large,” she replied; and she began to count those
+for whom the Tree this year was meant.
+
+First she called the names of the two children they had lost. Gifts
+for these were every year hung on the boughs. She mentioned their
+names now, and then she continued counting:
+
+“Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the family
+come Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor’s children.  Then
+the servants--long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow for
+the other children who are to make up the Christmas party: ten
+children have been invited, ten children have accepted, ten children
+will arrive. The ten will bring with them some unimportant parents;
+you can judge.”
+
+“That will do for size,” he said, laughing.  “Now the kind:
+spruce--larch--hemlock--pine--which shall it be?”
+
+“It shall be none of them!” she answered, after a little waiting. “It
+shall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeer
+are harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts--fir.  The old
+Christmas stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in it
+longest. And deepest mystery darkens the heart of it,” she added.
+
+“Fir it shall be!” he said. “Choose the tree.”
+
+“I have chosen.”
+
+She stopped and delicately touched his wrist with the finger tips of
+one white-gloved hand, bidding him stand beside her.
+
+“That one,” she said, pointing down.
+
+The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens in summer gratefully,
+but now lying like a band of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near
+the middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on this
+island, aloof from its fellows and with space for the growth of its
+boughs, stood a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering
+faultlessly, star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered more
+years--a tame dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurred
+with wildness and lapped by low washings of the planet’s primeval
+ocean.
+
+At each Christmas for several years they had been tempted to cut this
+tree, but had spared it for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the
+thicket.
+
+“That one,” she now said, pointing down.  “This is the last time. Let
+us have the best of things while we may! Is it not always the perfect
+that is demanded for sacrifice?”
+
+His glance had already gone forward eagerly to the tree, and he
+started toward it.
+
+Descending, they stepped across the brook to the island and went up
+close to the fir. With a movement not unobserved by her he held out
+his hand and clasped three green fingers of a low bough which the fir
+seemed to stretch out to him recognizingly. (She had always realized
+the existence of some intimate bond between him and the forest.) His
+face now filled with meanings she did not share; the spell of the
+secret work had followed him out of the house down to the trees;
+incommunicable silence shut him in.  A moment later his fingers parted
+with the green fingers of the fir and he moved away from her side,
+starting around the tree and studying it as though in delight of fresh
+knowledge. So she watched him pass around to the other side.
+
+When he came back where he had started, she was not there. He looked
+around searchingly; her figure was nowhere in sight.
+
+He stood--waiting.
+
+The valley had memories, what memories!  The years came close together
+here; they clustered as thickly as the trees themselves. Vacant spots
+among them marked where the Christmas Trees of former years had been
+cut down. Some of the Trees had been for the two children they had
+lost. This wandering trail led hither and thither back to the first
+Tree for the first child: he had stooped down and cut that close to
+the ground with his mere penknife. When it had been lighted, it had
+held only two or three candles; and the candle on the top of it had
+flared level into the infant’s hand-shaded eyes.
+
+He knew that she was making through the evergreens a Pilgrimage of the
+Years, walking there softly and alone with the feet of life’s Pities
+and a mother’s Constancies.
+
+He waited for her--motionless.
+
+The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley now. Only from the
+trees came the plaintive twittering of birds which had come in from
+frozen weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds of the boughs were
+calling to one another. It was not their song, but their speech; there
+was no love in it, but there was what for them perhaps corresponds to
+our sense of ties. It most resembled in human life the brief things
+that two people, having long lived together, utter to each other when
+together in a room they prepare for the night: there is no
+anticipation; it is a confession of the unconfessed.  About him now
+sounded this low winter music from the far boundary of other lives.
+
+He did not hear it.
+
+The light on the landscape had changed. The sun was setting and a
+splendor began to spread along the sky and across the land. It laid a
+glory on the roof of the house on the hill; it smote the edge of the
+woodland pasture, burnishing with copper the gray domes; it shone
+faintly on distant corn shocks, on the weather-dark tents of the hemp
+at bivouac soldierly and grim. At his feet it sparkled in rose gleams
+on the samite of the brook and threw burning shafts into the gloom of
+the fir beside him.
+
+He did not see it.
+
+He did not hear the calling of the birds about his ears, he did not
+see the sunset before his eyes, he did not feel the fir tree the
+boughs of which stuck against his side.
+
+He stood there as still as a rock--with his secret. Not the secret of
+the year’s work, which was to be divulged to his wife and through her
+to the world; but the secret which for some years had been growing in
+his life and which would, he hoped, never grow into the open--to be
+seen of her and of all men.
+
+The sentimental country hat now looked as though it might have been
+worn purposely to help out a disguise, as the more troubled man behind
+the scenes makes up to be the happier clown. It became an absurdity, a
+mockery, above his face grave, stern, set of jaw and eye. He was no
+longer the student buried among his books nor human brother to toiling
+brothers. He had not the slightest thought of service to mankind left
+in him, he was but a man himself with enough to think of in the battle
+between his own will and blood.
+
+And behind him among the dark evergreens went on that Pilgrimage of
+the Years--with the feet of the Pities and the Constancies.
+
+Moments passed; he did not stir. Then there was a slight noise on the
+other side of the tree, and his nature instantly stepped back into his
+outward place. He looked through the boughs. She had returned and was
+standing with her face also turned toward the sunset; it was very
+pale, very still.
+
+Such darkness had settled on the valley now that the green she wore
+blent with the green of the fir. He saw only her white face and her
+white hands so close to the branches that they appeared to rest upon
+them, to grow out of them: he sadly thought of one of his prints of
+Egypt of old and of the Lady of the Sacred Tree. Her long
+backward-sweeping plume of green also blent with the green of the
+fir--shade to shade--and only the coral tip of it remained strongly
+visible. This matched the last coral in the sunset; and it seemed to
+rest ominously above her head as a finger-point of the fading light of
+Nature.
+
+He went quickly around to her. He locked his arms around her and drew
+her close and held her close; and thus for a while the two stood,
+watching the flame on the altar of the world as it sank lower, leaving
+emptiness and ashes.
+
+Once she put out a hand and with a gesture full of majesty and
+nobleness waved farewell to the dying fire.
+
+Still without a word he took his arms from around her and turned
+energetically to the tree.
+
+He pressed the lowest boughs aside and made his way in close to the
+trunk and struck it with a keen stroke.
+
+The fir as he drew the axe out made at its gashed throat a sound like
+that of a butchered, blood-strangled creature trying to cry out too
+late against a treachery. A horror ran through the boughs; the
+thousands of leaves were jarred by the death-strokes; and the top of
+it rocked like a splendid plume too rudely treated in a storm. Then it
+fell over on its side, bridging blackly the white ice of the brook.
+
+Stooping, he lifted it triumphantly. He set the butt-end on one of his
+shoulders and, stretching his arms up, grasped the trunk and held the
+tree straight in the air, so that it seemed to be growing out of his
+big shoulder as out of a ledge of rock.  Then he turned to her and
+laughed out in his strength and youth. She laughed joyously back at
+him, glorying as he did.
+
+With a robust re-shouldering of the tree to make it more comfortable
+to carry, he turned and started up the hill toward the house. As she
+followed behind, the old mystery of the woods seemed at last to have
+taken bodily possession of him. The fir was riding on his shoulder,
+its arms met fondly around his neck, its fingers were caressing his
+hair. And it whispered back jeeringly to her through the twilight:
+
+“Say farewell to him! He was once yours; he is yours no longer. He
+dandles the child of the forest on his shoulder instead of his
+children by you in the house. He belongs to Nature; and as Nature
+calls, he will always follow--though it should lead over the precipice
+or into the flood.  Once Nature called him to you: remember how he
+broke down barriers until he won you. Now he is yours no longer--say
+good-by to him!”
+
+With an imbued terror and desolation, she caught up with him. By a
+movement so soft that he should not be aware, she plucked him by the
+coat sleeve on the other side from the fir and held on to him as he
+strode on in careless joy.
+
+Halfway up the hill lights began to flash from the windows of the
+house: a servant was bringing in the lamps. It was at this hour, in
+just this way, that she had first caught sight of them on that
+Christmas Eve when he had brought her home after the wedding.
+
+She hurried around in front of him, wishing to read the expression of
+his eyes by the distant gleams from the windows. Would they have
+nothing to say to her about those winter twilight lamps? Did he, too,
+not remember?
+
+His head and face were hidden; a thousand small spears of Nature
+bristled between him and her; but he laughed out to her from behind
+the rampart of the green spears.
+
+At that moment a low sound in the distance drew her attention, and
+instantly alert she paused to listen. Then, forgetting everything
+else, she called to him with a rush of laughter like that of her
+mischief-loving girlhood:
+
+“Quick! There they are! I heard the gate shut at the turnpike! They
+must not catch us!  Quick! Quick!”
+
+“Hurry, then!” he cried, as he ran forward, joining his laughter to
+hers. “Open the door for me!”
+
+After this the night fell fast. The only sounds to be heard in the
+valley were the minute readjustments of the ice of the brook as it
+froze tighter and the distressed cries of the birds that had roosted
+in the fir.
+
+So the Tree entered the house.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+
+
+During the night it turned bitter cold.  When morning came the sky was
+a turquoise and the wind a gale.  The sun seemed to give out light but
+not heat--to lavish its splendor but withhold its charity. Moist flesh
+if it chanced to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter land
+the tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece of greased metal used as
+a trap and is caught and held there until the trapper returns or until
+it starves--starves with food on its tongue.
+
+The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farmhand struck it, resisted
+as rock. In the fetlocks of farm horses, as they moved shivering,
+balls of ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little roughnesses of
+woodland paths snapped off beneath the slow-searching hoofs of
+fodder-seeking cattle like points of glass.
+
+Within their wool the sheep were comforted.
+
+On higher fields which had given back their moisture to the atmosphere
+and now were dry, the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals and
+dragged it away in flaunting yellow veils. The picture it made, being
+so ill-seasoned, led you to think of August drought when the
+grasshopper stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is hot
+in the nostrils and every bird holds its beak open and its wings
+lifted like cooling lattices alongside its breast. In these veils of
+dust swarms of frost crystals sported--dead midgets of the dead
+North. Except crystal and dust and wind, naught moved out there; no
+field mouse, no hare nor lark nor little shielded dove. In the naked
+trees of the pasture the crow kept his beak as unseen as the owl’s;
+about the cedars of the yard no scarlet feather warmed the day.
+
+The house on the hill--one of the houses whose spirit had been blown
+into the amber of the poet’s song--sent festal smoke out of its
+chimneys all day long. At intervals the radiant faces of children
+appeared at the windows, hanging wreaths of evergreens; or their
+figures flitted to and fro within as they wove garlands on the walls
+for the Christmas party. At intervals some servant with head and
+shoulders muffled in a bright-colored shawl darted trippingly from the
+house to the cabins in the yard and from the cabins back to the
+house--the tropical African’s polar dance between fire and fire. By
+every sign it gave the house showed that it was marshalling its whole
+happiness.
+
+One thing only seemed to make a signal of distress from afar. The oak
+tree beside the house, whose roots coiled warmly under the
+hearth-stones and whose boughs were outstretched across the roof,
+seemed to writhe and rock in its winter sleep with murmurings and
+tossings like a human dreamer trying to get rid of an unhappy dream.
+Imagination might have said that some darkest tragedy of forests long
+since gone still lived in this lone survivor--that it struggled to
+give up the grief and guilt of an ancient forest shame.
+
+The weather moderated in the afternoon. A warm current swept across
+the upper atmosphere, developing everywhere behind it a cloud; and
+toward sundown out of this cloud down upon the Shield snow began to
+fall. Not the large wet flakes which sometimes descend too late in
+spring upon the buds of apple orchards; nor those mournfuller ones
+which drop too soon on dim wild violets in November woods, but winter
+snow, stern sculptor of Arctic solitudes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all over the Shield.
+
+Softly the snow fell upon the year’s footprints and pathways of
+children and upon schoolhouses now closed and riotously deserted. More
+softly upon too crowded asylums for them: houses of noonday darkness
+where eyes eagerly look out at the windows but do not see; houses of
+soundlessness where ears listen and do not hear any noise; houses of
+silence where lips try to speak but utter no word.
+
+The snow of Christmas Eve was falling softly on the old: whose eyes
+are always seeing vanished faces, whose ears hear voices gentler than
+any the earth now knows, whose hands forever try to reach other hands
+vainly held out to them.  Sad, sad to those who remember loved ones
+gone with their kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve!
+
+But sadder yet for those who live on together after kindnesses have
+ceased, or whose love went like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve to
+them! Dark its snow and blinding!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was late that night.
+
+She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a shaded lamp--the only
+light in the room. Her face, always calm in life’s wisdom, but
+agitated now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in toward her,
+rested clear-cut upon the darkness.
+
+She placed the lamp on a table near the door and seated herself beside
+it. But she pushed the lamp away unconsciously as though the light of
+the house were no longer her light; and she sat in the chair as though
+it were no longer her chair; and she looked about the room as though
+it were no longer hers nor the house itself nor anything else that she
+cared for most.
+
+Earlier in the evening they had finished hanging the presents on the
+Tree; but then an interruption had followed: the children had broken
+profanely in upon them, rending the veil of the house mysteries; and
+for more than an hour the night had been given up to them. Now the
+children were asleep upstairs, already dreaming of Christmas Morn and
+the rush for the stockings. The servants had finished their work and
+were gone to their quarters out in the yard. The doors of the house
+were locked. There would be no more intrusion now, no possible
+interruption; all the years were to meet him and her--alone. For Life
+is the master dramatist: when its hidden tragedies are ready to utter
+themselves, everything superfluous quits the stage; it is the
+essential two who fill it! And how little the rest of the world ever
+hears of what takes place between the two!
+
+A little while before he had left the room with the step-ladder; when
+he came back, he was to bring with him the manuscript--the silent
+snowfall of knowledge which had been deepening about him for a
+year. The time had already passed for him to return, but he did not
+come. Was there anything in the forecast of the night that made him
+falter? Was he shrinking--_him_ shrink? She put away the thought
+as a strange outbreak of injustice.
+
+How still it was outside the house with the snow falling! How still
+within! She began to hear the ticking of the tranquil old clock under
+the stairway out in the hall--always tranquil, always tranquil. And
+then she began to listen to the disordered strokes of her own
+heart--that red Clock in the body’s Tower whose beats are sent outward
+along the streets and alleys of the blood; whose law it is to be
+alternately wound too fast by the fingers of Joy, too slow by the
+fingers of Sorrow; and whose fate, if it once run down, never
+afterwards either by Joy or Sorrow to be made to run again.
+
+At last she could hear the distant door of his study open and close
+and his steps advance along the hall. With what a splendid swing and
+tramp he brought himself toward her!--with what self-unconsciousness
+and virile strength in his feet!  His steps entered and crossed his
+bedroom, entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he stood there
+before her in the parlor doorway, a few yards off--stopped and
+regarded her intently, smiling.
+
+In a moment she realized what had delayed him. When he had gone away
+with the step-ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behind
+locked doors, he had been working all the afternoon at the decorations
+of the Tree. Now he came back ceremoniously dressed; the rest of the
+night was to be in her honor.
+
+It had always been so on this anniversary of their bridal night. They
+had always dressed for it; the children now in their graves had been
+dressed for it; the children in bed upstairs were regularly dressed
+for it; the house was dressed for it; the servants were dressed for
+it; the whole life of that establishment had always been made to feel
+by honors and tendernesses and gayeties that this was the night on
+which he had married her and brought her home.
+
+As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as never before how these
+anniversaries had not taken his youth away, but had added youth to
+him; he had grown like the evergreen in the middle of the room--with
+increase of trunk and limbs and with larger tides of strength surging
+through him toward the master sun. There were no ravages of married
+life in him. Time had merely made the tree more of a tree and made his
+youth more youth.
+
+She took in momentary details of his appearance: a moisture like
+summer heat along the edge of his yellow hair, started by the bath
+into which he had plunged; the freshness of the enormous hands holding
+the manuscript; the muscle of the forearm bulging within the
+dress-coat sleeve.  Many a time she had wondered how so perfect an
+animal as he had ever climbed to such an elevation of work; and then
+had wondered again whether any but such an animal ever in life does so
+climb--shouldering along with him the poise and breadth of health and
+causing the hot sun of the valley to shine on the mountain tops.
+
+Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed in her honor, thus
+but the larger youth after all their years together, would return her
+greeting with a light in his eyes that had always made them so
+beautiful to her--a light burning as at a portal opening inward for
+her only.
+
+His eyes rested on his manuscript.
+
+He brought it wrapped and tied in the true holiday spirit--sprigs of
+cedar and holly caught in the ribands; and he now lifted and held it
+out to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems.  Then he
+stepped forward and put it on the table at her elbow.
+
+“For you!” he said reverently, stepping back.
+
+There had been years when, returning from a tramp across the country,
+he would bring her perhaps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or a
+brilliant autumn leaf for her throat.
+
+“For you!” he would say; and then, before he could give it to her, he
+would throw it away and take her in his arms. Afterwards she would
+pick up the trifle and treasure it.
+
+“For you!” he now said, offering her the treasure of his year’s toil
+and stepping back.
+
+So the weight of the gift fell on her heart like a stone. She did not
+look at it or touch it but glanced up at him. He raised his finger,
+signalling for silence; and going to the chimney corner, brought back
+a long taper and held it over the lamp until it ignited. Then with a
+look which invited her to follow, he walked to the Tree and began to
+light the candles.
+
+He began at the lowest boughs and, passing around, touched them one by
+one. Around and around he went, and higher and higher twinkled the
+lights as they mounted the tapering sides of the fir. At the top he
+kindled one highest red star, shining down on everything below. Then
+he blew out the taper, turned out the lamp; and returning to the tree,
+set the heavy end of the taper on the floor and grasped it midway, as
+one might lightly hold a stout staff.
+
+The room, lighted now by the common glow of the candles, revealed
+itself to be the parlor of the house elaborately decorated for the
+winter festival.  Holly wreaths hung in the windows; the walls were
+garlanded; evergreen boughs were massed above the window cornices; on
+the white lace of window curtains many-colored autumn leaves, pressed
+and kept for this night, looked as though they had been blown there
+scatteringly by October winds. The air of the room was heavy with
+odors; there was summer warmth in it.
+
+In the middle of the room stood the fir tree itself, with its top
+close to the ceiling and its boughs stretched toward the four walls of
+the room impartially--as symbolically to the four corners of the
+earth. It would be the only witness of all that was to take place
+between them: what better could there be than this messenger of
+silence and wild secrecy? From the mountains and valleys of the planet
+its race had looked out upon a million generations of men and women;
+and the calmness of its lot stretched across the turbulence of human
+passion as an ancient bridge spans a modern river.
+
+At the apex of the Tree a star shone. Just beneath at the first
+forking of the boughs a candle burned. A little lower down a cross
+gleamed.  Under the cross a white dove hung poised, its pinions
+outstretched as though descending out of the infinite upon some
+earthly object below.  From many of the branches tiny bells swung.
+There were little horns and little trumpets.  Other boughs sagged
+under the weight of silvery cornucopias. Native and tropical fruits
+were tied on here and there; and dolls were tied on also with cords
+around their necks, their feet dangling.  There were smiling masks,
+like men beheaded and smiling in their death. Near the base of the
+Tree there was a drum. And all over the Tree from pinnacle to base
+glittered a tinsel like golden fleece--looking as the moss of old
+Southern trees seen at yellow sunset.
+
+He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation of it. This year at his
+own request the decorations had been left wholly to him; now he seemed
+satisfied.
+
+He turned to her eagerly.
+
+“Do you remember what took place on Christmas Eve last year?” he
+asked, with a reminiscent smile. “You sat where you are sitting and I
+stood where I am standing. After I had finished lighting the Tree, do
+you remember what you said?”
+
+After a moment she stirred and passed her fingers across her brows.
+
+“Recall it to me,” she answered. “I must have said many things. I did
+not know that I had said anything that would be remembered a year.
+Recall it to me.”
+
+“You looked at the Tree and said what a mystery it is. When and where
+did it begin, how and why?--this Tree that is now nourished in the
+affections of the human family round the world.”
+
+“Yes; I remember that.”
+
+“I resolved to find out for you. I determined to prepare during what
+hours I could spare from my regular college work the gratification of
+your wish for you as a gift from me. If I could myself find the way
+back through the labyrinth of ages, then I would return for you and
+lead you back through the story of the Christmas Tree as that story
+has never been seen by any one else. All this year’s work, then, has
+been the threading of the labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again,
+my work is finished, my gift to you is ready.”
+
+He made this announcement and stopped, leaving it to clear the air of
+mystery--the mystery of the secret work.
+
+Then he resumed: “Have you, then, been the Incident in this toil as
+yesterday you intimated that you were? Do you now see that you have
+been the whole reason of it? You were excluded from any share in the
+work only because you could not help to prepare your own gift! That is
+all. What has looked like a secret in this house has been no
+secret. You are blinded and bewildered no longer; the hour has come
+when holly and cedar can speak for themselves.”
+
+Sunlight broke out all over his face.
+
+She made no reply but said within herself:
+
+“Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has nothing to do with the
+trouble. The secret of the house is not a misunderstanding; it is
+life. It is not the doing of a year; it is the undoing of the
+years. It is not a gift to enrich me with new happiness; it is a
+lesson that leaves me poorer.”
+
+He went on without pausing:
+
+“It is already late. The children interrupted us and took up part of
+your evening. But it is not too late for me to present to you some
+little part of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a short story
+out of the long one. The whole long story is there,” he added,
+directing his eyes toward the manuscript at her elbow; and his voice
+showed how he felt a scholar’s pride in it.  “From you it can pass out
+to the world that celebrates Christmas and that often perhaps asks the
+same question: What is the history of the Christmas Tree? But now my
+story for you!”
+
+“Wait a moment,” she said, rising. She left the package where it was;
+and with feet that trembled against the soft carpet crossed the room
+and seated herself at one end of a deep sofa.
+
+Gathering her dignity about her, she took there the posture of a
+listener--listening at her ease.
+
+The sofa was of richly carved mahogany.  Each end curved into a scroll
+like a landward wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms rested on
+one of the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small table
+on which stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it
+profuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They were one of her
+favorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her this
+afternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen
+messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down the
+wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back
+were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of the sofa her piano
+stood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to him, or played
+with thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music also which
+she many a time read; as Beethoven’s Great Nine.
+
+Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to window
+curtain there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put there
+by the children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoon
+they had fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree
+felled the day before--they knowing nothing, happy children!
+
+There she reclined.
+
+The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness over
+which points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in some
+too warm a night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and the
+blackness of her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare arms
+and shoulders and faultless neck and faultless throat bared also. Not
+far away was hid the warm foam-white thigh, curved like Venus’s of old
+out of the sea’s inaccessible purity. About her wrists garlands of old
+family corals were clasped--the ocean’s roses; and on her breast,
+between the night of her gown and the dawn of the flesh, coral buds
+flowered in beauty that could never be opened, never be rifled.
+
+When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two aged
+house-dogs--setters with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle
+breeding--had followed her and lain down at her feet; and one with a
+thrust of his nose pushed her skirts back from the toe of her slipper
+and rested his chin on it.
+
+“I will listen,” she said, shrinking as yet from other speech. “I wish
+simply to listen. There will be time enough afterwards for what I have
+to say.”
+
+“Then I shall go straight through,” he replied.  “One minute now while
+I put together the story for you: it is hard to make a good short
+story out of so vast a one.”
+
+During these moments of waiting she saw a new picture of him. Under
+stress of suffering and excitement discoveries denied to calmer hours
+often arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a shock that
+causes it to yawn and open its abysses: at the bottom we see new
+things: sometimes creating new happiness; sometimes old happiness is
+taken away.
+
+As he stood there--the man beside the Tree--into the picture entered
+three other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on the
+walls.
+
+One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale the
+mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the
+reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central
+portions where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the
+rocks: Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing
+and fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and
+children. With his passion for the wilderness--its game, enemies,
+campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely,
+stern, gaunt face, no modern expression in it whatsoever--the timeless
+face of the woods.
+
+Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of the
+family. This man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi the
+central counties; and wherever his power had reached, he had used it
+on a great scale for the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer,
+field-maker; working to bring in the period on the Shield when the
+hand of a man began to grasp the plough instead of the rifle, when the
+stallion had replaced the stag, and bellowing cattle wound fatly down
+into the pastures of the bison. This man had the face of his
+caste--the countenance of the Southern slave-holding feudal lord. Not
+the American face, but the Southern face of a definite era--less than
+national, less than modern; a face not looking far in any direction
+but at things close around.
+
+From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with his
+contemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of the
+Shield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie with
+remnants of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near this
+house. This immediate forefather bore the countenance that began to
+develop in the Northerner and in the Southerner after the Civil War:
+not the Northern look nor the Southern look, but the American look--a
+new thing in the American face, indefinable but unmistakable.
+
+These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of
+the line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of
+them in his own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the
+woods as an implement. In his own case, the woods around him having
+disappeared, the ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry.
+
+The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern
+forestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professorship
+his original researches in this field began to attract attention.
+These had to do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation to
+South Appalachian civilization and thus to that of the continent.
+
+This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from his
+own college and country to a Northern university.
+
+Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of an
+ancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into
+that of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into the
+modern American face unlike any other; now finally in him the national
+American look had broadened into something more modern still--the look
+of mere humanity: he did not look like an American--he looked like a
+man in the service of mankind.
+
+This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself to
+her as one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how the
+past had swept him along with its current; and of how the future now
+caught him up and bore him on, part in its problems. The old passion
+living on in him--forest life; a new passion born in him--human
+life. And by inexorable logic these two now blending themselves
+to-night in a story of the Christmas Tree.
+
+But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces something
+intensely personal to which she could cling; and she did it in this
+wise.
+
+In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they would
+go out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; she
+leading him this way and that way and laying upon him beautiful
+exactions and tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not do
+this and not do that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave.
+
+Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her down
+the lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summer
+evening woods; and there on the roots of some old tree--the shadows of
+the forest behind them and the light of the western sky in their
+faces--they would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes from
+each other.
+
+The burning horizon became a cathedral interior--the meeting of love’s
+holiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil upon
+the low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses and
+turf of the Shield under them. The warmth of his body was as the day’s
+sunlight stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like its
+tawny bloom, native to the sun.
+
+Life with him was enchanted madness.
+
+He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write on
+the air of the room.  Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his
+classroom when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standing
+at the blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of his
+lecture for the students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as he
+finished each word, he read it aloud to her:
+
+“A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK”
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+
+
+“Josephine!”
+
+He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of it
+float over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls of
+the room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication.
+
+Then he began:
+
+“Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a spring
+morning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. I
+have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question the
+blossoms in your questioning way--you who are always wishing to probe
+the heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of their
+significance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragrant
+trumpets could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It was
+where the filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of a
+dead past that you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces of
+their philosophy.
+
+“So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modern
+man to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of
+the vine; the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach of
+life; and the point where it clamors for satisfaction is at the
+greatest possible distance from its birthplace. For all these
+instincts send their roots down through the mould of the uncivilized,
+down through the mould of the primitive, down into the mould of the
+underhuman--that ancient playhouse dedicated to low tragedies.
+
+“While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of the
+story, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are to
+ourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kind
+of father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beings
+we are to our fellow beings--the passions which swell as with sap the
+buds of those relations until they burst into their final shapes of
+conduct are fed from the bottom of the world’s mould.  You and I
+to-night are building the structures of our moral characters upon
+life-piles that sink into fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our
+drinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majestically towards the sea
+and catch drops trickling from the springs of creation.
+
+“It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that
+my story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human
+nature as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have
+wrested it from this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house
+on this Night of the Nativity.”
+
+He made the scholar’s pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy
+narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling
+the story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid
+Alpine snows.
+
+He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of
+the human race is the sea.  It is true that man in some ancestral form
+was rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the
+islanded Greeks said of near Venus.  Traces of this origin he still
+bears both in his body and his emotions; and together they make up his
+first set of memories--Sea Memories.
+
+He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single
+picturesque phrase:
+
+“Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which the
+hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are
+sounding.”
+
+Next he told her how man’s last marine ancestor quit one day the sea
+never again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach and
+entered the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, soft to
+impressions, the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shape
+it over from sea uses to forest uses.
+
+A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at the
+sea-shell.
+
+It remodelled the shell as so much clay; stood it up and twisted and
+branched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron;
+tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble;
+painted it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it up
+as a life tower--the world’s one beacon: steadily sending it onward
+through one trial form after another until at last had been perfected
+for it that angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to
+sob and to smile.
+
+And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and entered
+the forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared
+at the edge of the forest the creature it had made.  On every wall of
+its being internal and external forest-written; and completely
+forest-minded: having nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling,
+forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith; so that in all it could
+do or know or feel or dream or imagine or believe it was
+forest-tethered.
+
+At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelled
+to emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had been
+driven to quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn of
+our history of him.
+
+And if the first set of race memories--Sea Memories--still endure
+within him, how much more powerful are the second set--the Forest
+Memories!
+
+So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished as
+forest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant races
+on the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether and
+will become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerful
+that those highest races which have been longest out in the open--as
+our own Aryan race--have never ceased to be reached by the influence
+of the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning trees
+falling across the mortal clearings toward the sunset.
+
+These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlike
+generations of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuated
+affections which we call in ourselves the Love of Nature; these
+affections are inherited: new feelings for nature we have none. The
+writers of our day who speak of civilized man’s love of nature as a
+developing sense err wholly. They are like explorers who should
+mistake a boundary for the interior of a continent. Man’s knowledge of
+nature is modern, but it no more endows him with new feeling than
+modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new bone or his latest
+knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an additional artery.
+
+Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are Forest
+Memories.
+
+But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, that
+contains the separate buried root of the story: Man’s Forest Faith.
+
+When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it had
+planted in him--there to grow forever--the root of faith that he was a
+forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the
+science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To
+himself forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be
+his immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the
+Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were
+descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race
+is tethered to the world-ash.  Among every people of antiquity this
+forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some
+ancestral tree. In the Orient each succeeding Buddha of Indian
+mythology was tethered to a different tree; each god of the later
+classical Pantheon was similarly tethered: Jupiter to the oak, Apollo
+to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno to the
+apple, on and on. Forest worship was universal--the most impressive
+and bewildering to modern science that the human spirit has ever built
+up. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the Trees.
+
+Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the ages
+toward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew with
+his growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successive
+scythes of time; but always new sprouts were put forth.
+
+Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodily
+presence within the forest; but one final day the forest lost the
+Immortal as its indwelling creator.
+
+Next the old forest worshipper peopled the trees with an intermediate
+race of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long he
+beguiled himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; but
+the lesser could not maintain themselves in temples from which the
+greater had already been expelled, and they too passed out of sight
+down the roadway of the world.
+
+Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and during
+yet later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woods
+became freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals of
+his own race had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations of
+the gods.  Then this last panorama of illusion faded also, and
+civilized man stood face to face with the modern woods--inhabitated
+only by its sap and cells. The trees had drawn their bark close around
+them, wearing an inviolate tapestry across those portals through which
+so many a stranger to them had passed in and passed out; and
+henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest--its one reply to all
+man’s questionings--became the Voice of its own Mystery.
+
+After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. But
+we must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of
+human life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own
+Indo-European race dwells as it were on the forest edge. And the
+forest still reaches out and twines itself around our deepest
+spiritual truths: home--birth--love--prayer--death: it tries to
+overrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our houses,
+instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and to
+shelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countries
+whenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature;
+in our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonies
+with garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped
+hi cathedral stone--memory of the grove, God’s first temple; and when
+we die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of
+our rest.  Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some
+obscure instinct in us that it is God-forsaken.
+
+Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for his
+spirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf and
+tendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every later
+world-worship; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into the
+ritual of Christianity.
+
+This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence at
+the Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man worshipping the
+tree as the Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we see
+him using that tree in the worship of the creative Father’s Son come
+to earth in the Father’s stead.
+
+“On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brief
+tapers of the night; but on it rests also the long light of that
+spiritual dawn when man began his Adoration of the Trees.  It is the
+forest taking its place once more beside the long-lost Immortal.”
+
+Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should address
+her thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual for
+them. For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the ground
+of his lectures, and she shared his thought before it reached
+others. It was their high and equal comradeship. Wherever his mind
+could go hers went--a brilliant torch, a warming sympathy.
+
+But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on a
+motionless figure of stone.  If he was sensible of this change in her,
+he gave no sign. And after a moment he passed to the remaining part of
+the story.
+
+“Thus far I have been speaking to you of the bare tree in wild nature:
+here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you that
+they too are Forest Memories--that since the evergreen moved over into
+the service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds these
+Forest Memories have followed it and have alighted amid its
+branches. Everything here has its story. I am going to tell you in
+each case what that story is; I am going to interpret everything on
+the Christmas Tree and the other Christmas decorations in the room.”
+
+It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him and
+never afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoe
+would have its; he must interpret that: and thus he himself
+unexpectedly had brought about the situation she wished. She would
+meet him at that symbolic bough: there be rendered the Judgment of the
+Years! And now as one sits down at some point of a road where a
+traveller must arrive, she waited for him there.
+
+He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest
+worshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his
+offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in
+offering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man had
+learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive
+custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during
+that immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set
+one stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove--the
+only cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was
+prayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the
+Christmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of
+primitive man and is as ancient as forest worship itself.
+
+And now he began.
+
+With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of the
+fir. This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of
+Bethlehem which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the
+Night of the Nativity--the Star of the New Born. But modern
+discoveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or
+five thousand years before the Christian era; and as far back as they
+have been traced, we find the wise men of the East worshipping this
+same star and being guided by it in their spiritual wanderings as they
+searched for the incarnation of the Divine. They worshipped it as the
+star of peace and goodness and purity. Many a pious Wolfram in those
+dim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn to the same star, for
+love of some Chaldean Elizabeth--both he and she blown about the
+desert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on these records the
+star and the Tree are brought together as here side by side.  And the
+story of the star leads backward to one of the first things that man
+ever worshipped as he looked beyond the forest: the light of the
+heavens floating in the depth of space--light that he wanted but could
+not grasp.
+
+He touched the next object on the Tree--the candle under the star--and
+went on:
+
+Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at the end of ages having
+caught this light--having brought it down in the language of his myth
+from heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in space as having
+become a star in his hand--the candle: the star worshipper had now
+become also the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back to the
+fire worshippers of ancient Persia--those highlands of the spirit
+seeking light. We think of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merely
+borrowed from the candle of the altar for the purpose of illumination;
+but the use of it goes back to a time when the forest worshipper, now
+also the fire worshipper, hung his lights on the trees, having no
+other altar. Far down toward modern times the temples of the old
+Prussians, for example, were oak groves, and among them a hierarchy of
+priests was ordained to keep the sacred fire perpetually burning at
+the root of the sacred oak.
+
+He touched the third object on the tree--the cross under the
+candle--and went on:
+
+“To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event:
+Calvary and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw
+and the apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that age
+thought of the cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Paul
+and the rest went down into their graves without so regarding it. The
+Magdalene never clung to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out at
+the foot of it the benizon of her tears. Not until the third century
+after Christ did the Bishops assembled at Nice announce it a Christian
+symbol. But it was a sacred emblem in the dateless antiquity of
+Egypt. To primitive man it stood for that sacred light and fire of
+life which was himself. For he himself is a cross--the first cross he
+has ever known. The faithful may truly think of the Son of Man as
+crucified as the image of humanity.  And thus ages before Christ,
+cross worship and forest worship were brought together: for instance,
+among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs of which made with
+the trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on these three they
+cut the names of three of their gods and this was holy-cross wood.”
+
+He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on the
+tree--the dove under the cross, and went on:
+
+“In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white dove
+of the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the
+heavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends,
+overshadowing the Grail. But ages before Christ the prolific white
+dove of Syria was worshipped throughout the Orient as the symbol of
+reproductive Nature: and to this day the Almighty is there believed to
+manifest himself under this form. In ancient Mesopotamia the divine
+mother of nature is often represented with this dove as having
+actually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand. And here again
+forest worship early became associated with the worship of the dove;
+for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove nurtured in
+the oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and its wings
+an omen.”
+
+On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story of
+each backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each was
+entwined with forest worship.
+
+He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, he
+said, was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of
+the vine. And vine worship was forest worship.  Moreover, in the same
+oak grove at Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and their
+tinklings also were sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boy
+beats on Christmas Day, was beaten ages before Christ in the worship
+of Confucius: the story of it dies away toward what was man’s first
+written music in forgotten China.  In the first century of the
+Christian era, on one of the most splendid of the old Buddhist
+sculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the worship of
+the sacred tree--once more showing how music passed into the service
+of forest faith.
+
+He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram’s
+horn--the primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and used
+also to pour out the last product of the vine in honor of the vine
+itself--the forest’s first goblet.
+
+He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldest
+of all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learned
+to shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could at
+least bring to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring,
+the wild fruit of autumn.
+
+He kept on until only three things on the Tree were left
+uninterpreted; the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that
+he had left these to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the
+most trivial but really the most grave; for by means of them most
+clearly could be traced the presence of great law running through the
+progress of humanity.
+
+He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping it
+like a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course of
+ages it had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forest
+worship: a once universal custom of adorning the tree with everything
+most precious to the giver in token of his sacrifice and
+self-sacrifice.  Even in Jeremiah is an account of the lading of the
+sacred tree with gold and ornaments.  Herodotus relates that when
+Xerxes was invading Lydia, on the march he saw a divine tree and had
+it honored with golden robes and gifts. Livy narrates that when
+Romulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal City, he hung rich
+spoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this custom of
+decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until we can
+meet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece
+and in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.  Now the custom
+has dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree--the mock
+sacrifice for the real.
+
+He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind their
+mockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing
+prisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forest
+worship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this to
+have been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes.  In the course
+of time, when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mock
+countenance replaced the real.
+
+He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others,
+its long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificing
+children in forest worship. How common this custom was the early
+literature of the human race too abundantly testifies. We encounter
+the trace of it in Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac--arrested by the
+command of Jehovah. But Abraham would never have thought of slaying
+his son to propitiate his God, had not the custom been well
+established.  In the case of Jephthah’s daughter the sacrifice was
+actually allowed. We come upon the same custom in the fate of
+Iphigenia--at a critical turning point in the world’s mercy; in her
+stead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac’s case, was
+accepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against the
+inhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock for
+the real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of the
+Christmas Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive rites
+only these playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of the
+innocent.
+
+He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All the
+little stories, like pathways running backward into the distance and
+ever converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forest
+worship and they met in some sacrifice by the human heart.
+
+And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:
+
+“Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Tree
+is all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper could
+not worship without giving, because to worship is to give: therefore
+he brought his gifts to the forest--his first altar. These gifts,
+remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were his
+sacrifices and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since,
+the same law lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed the
+better to the worse; in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to
+the best. If the race should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, it
+would still have to worship what is highest in human nature and so
+worshipping, it would still be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice
+become the law of self-sacrifice: it would still be necessary to offer
+up what is low in us to what is higher. Only one portion of mankind
+has ever believed in Jerusalem; but every religion has known its own
+Calvary.”
+
+He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited her
+appreciation. She had sat watching him without a movement and without
+a word.  But when at last she asked him a question, she spoke as a
+listener who wakens from a long revery.
+
+“Have you finished the story for me?” she inquired.
+
+“I have finished the story for you,” he replied without betraying
+disappointment at her icy reception of it.
+
+Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head,
+turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throat
+showed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays of
+mistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:
+
+“You have not interpreted this,” she said, her mind fixed on that sole
+omission.
+
+“I have not explained that,” he admitted.
+
+She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest toward
+the manuscript on the table across the room.
+
+“Have you explained it there?”
+
+“I have not explained it there.”
+
+“But why?” she said with disappointment.
+
+“I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine.”
+
+“But why, Frederick?” she inquired, startled into wonderment.
+
+He smiled: “If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story.”
+
+“But why do you not wish to tell me the story?”
+
+He answered with warning frankness: “If you once saw it as a picture,
+the picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life
+darkly.”
+
+She protested: “If it is dark to you, why should I not share the
+darkness of it? Have we not always looked at life’s shadows together?
+And thus seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us
+and dark things but half as dark?”
+
+He merely repeated his warning: “It is a story of a crueler age than
+ours. It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids.”
+
+She answered: “So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to
+take seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from
+the forest worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not
+printed in books? Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in
+libraries to be read? If others read them, may not I? And since when
+must I begin to dread anything in books?  Or anything in life? And
+since when did we begin to look at life apart, we who have always
+looked at it with four eyes?”
+
+“I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things
+to see with two, and things to see with none.”
+
+With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
+mistletoe.
+
+“Tell me the story of this!” she pleaded as though she demanded a
+right. As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they
+closed and went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the
+white pearls of the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and
+were broken apart and rolled across her breast into her lap.
+
+He looked grave; silence or speech--which were better for her? Either,
+he now saw, would give her pain.
+
+“Happily the story is far away from us,” he said, as though he were
+half inclined to grant her request.
+
+“If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you
+brought the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the
+dove and the others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me!
+Steep me in it as you have steeped yourself!”
+
+He held back a long time: “You who are so safe in good, why know
+evil?”
+
+“Frederick,” she cried, “I shall have to insist upon your telling me
+this story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know.
+Then tell it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give
+each heavy part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty--and truth be
+truth!”
+
+He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
+change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into
+the narrative of the historian:
+
+“Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
+Palestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening
+by the blue Ægean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals--the
+living images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful
+eternity of Art--Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in
+the temple at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little
+children who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown
+soldiers of Cæsar’s legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the
+sacred grove of Dodona,--where the motions of oak boughs were
+auguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divine
+messages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine
+meanings,--in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of
+Ephesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites. To the
+south Pompeii, with its night laughter and song sounding far out
+toward the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes of its dread
+volcano, drained its goblet and did not care, emptied it as often as
+filled and asked for nothing more. A little distance off Herculaneum,
+with its tender dreams of Greece but with its arms around the
+breathing image of Italy, slept--uncovered.
+
+“Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps,
+lay unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Cæsar who was to conquer
+it; and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of
+Britain. All over that island one forest; in that forest one worship;
+in that worship one tree--the oak of England; and on that oak one
+bough--the mistletoe.”
+
+He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had in
+the early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it was
+the tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah.  In Greece it was the
+tree of Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italy
+it was the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of
+mankind. After the gods passed, it became the tree of the imperial
+Cæsars. After the Cæsars had passed, it was the oak that Michael
+Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the ceiling of the Sistine
+Chapel near the creation of man and his expulsion from Paradise--there
+as always the chosen tree of human desire.  In Britain it was the
+sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests
+performed none of their rites without using its leaves and branches:
+never anywhere in the world was the oak worshipped with such
+ceremonies and sacrifices as there.
+
+Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forest
+worship: the New Year’s day of the Druids.
+
+A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their
+way to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been
+found with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As the
+excited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of
+reverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is
+spread. In the midst of the assemblage one figure towers--the Arch
+Druid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own
+eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victims
+annually sacrificed to the oak.
+
+A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is
+clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough,
+and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden
+pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is
+blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each
+one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of
+which it is Nature’s emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have
+never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are
+slaughtered in sacrifice.
+
+Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to
+itself, and the New Year’s ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the
+oak is at an end.
+
+Here he ended the story.
+
+She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows
+knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in
+bewilderment:
+
+“But why did you call that a dark story?”  she asked. “Where is the
+cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will
+never throw a dark image on my mind: New Year’s day--the winter
+woods--the journeying throng--the oak--the bough--the banquet
+beneath--the white bulls with fillets on their horns--the white-robed
+priest--the golden sickle in his hand--the stroke that severs the
+mistletoe--the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will
+be blessed in life’s sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like
+to paint that scene.  In the centre should be some young girl,
+pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven’s covenant with
+her under the guise of a blossom.  How could you have wished to
+withhold such a story from me?”
+
+He smiled at her a little sadly.
+
+“I have not yet told you all,” he said, “but I have told you enough.”
+
+Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under
+her breath one word escaped:
+
+“Ah!”
+
+It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown to
+her.
+
+“I am sparing you, Josephine!”
+
+She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the
+wood in her clutch.
+
+“Are you sparing me?” she asked in a tone of torture. “Or are you
+sparing yourself?”
+
+The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed
+grasp to the floor.  He looked down at it a moment and then calmly
+picked it up.
+
+“I am going to tell you the story,” he said with a new quietness.
+
+She was aroused by some change in him.
+
+“I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!”
+
+“You will have to listen,” he said. “It is better for you to
+know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the
+bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be
+impossible for you to misjudge.”
+
+“I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I
+do not understand you are judging yourself!”
+
+He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himself
+up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right
+not to be pried into--not even by the nearest.
+
+The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer
+to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being
+thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his
+shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand
+of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial
+tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on
+him--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let its
+passing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned
+his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor
+likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood
+ankle-deep in forestry.
+
+This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of
+it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old
+forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest
+tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the
+earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she
+waited.
+
+He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the
+first sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:
+
+“Listen, Josephine!”
+
+She buried her face in her hands.
+
+“I cannot! I will not!”
+
+“You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my
+other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our
+people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first
+meaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forest
+survivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play and
+pastimes and lingering superstitions about the forest we cross faint
+traces of what were once vital realities.
+
+“Among these there has always been one that until recently I have
+never understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of
+everywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under the
+mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have
+always thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to
+some ancient rite--I could not discover what. Now I know.”
+
+In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.
+
+It is another scene in the forest of Britain.  This time it is not the
+first day of the year--the New Year’s day of the Druids when they
+celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer,
+perhaps the middle of May--May in England--with the young beauty of
+the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight.  The new moon is
+just silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the
+trees.  The hawthorn is in bloom--red and white--and not far from the
+spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing,
+singing, singing.
+
+Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of
+the woods--a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its
+youth and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the
+all-day sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild
+violet beds. Its huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though
+reaching for some object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as
+its badge of divine authority, worn there as a knight might wear the
+colors of his Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands--the
+Forest Lover.
+
+The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the
+moon’s rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more
+passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.
+
+Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the
+scene a young girl enters--her hair hanging down--her limbs most
+lightly clad--the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her
+skin--in her eyes love’s great need and mystery. Step by step she
+comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside
+thing may stay her strength.  She draws nearer to the oak, searching
+amid its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet
+more dreads not to find: the emblem of a woman’s fruitfulness which
+the young oak--the Forest Lover--reaches down toward her.  Finding it,
+beneath it with one deep breath of surrender she takes her place--the
+virgin’s tryst with the tree--there to be tested.
+
+Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience--submission to
+that test--or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has
+rejected.
+
+Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man
+enters--a tried and seasoned man--a human oak--counterpart of the
+Forest Lover--to officiate at the test.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence
+of his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of
+ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.
+
+_He_ was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was _his_
+feet that started toward the oak; _his_ eye that searched for the
+figure half fainting under the bough; for _him_ the bed of moss
+and violets--the hair falling over the eyes--the loosened girdle--the
+breasts of hawthorn white and pink--the listening song of the
+nightingale--the silence of the summer woods--the seclusion--the full
+surrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape
+the penalty of their own death.
+
+The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his
+own story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The
+light that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them--the
+old, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense
+nostrils.
+
+And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years
+before and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his
+lips--tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the
+room fell his words:
+
+“_Bride of the Mistletoe!_”
+
+The storm that had broken over him died away.  He shut his eyes on the
+vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.
+
+He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or
+he may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about
+himself.
+
+“This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine,” he said quietly.
+
+She was sitting there before him--the mother of his children, of the
+sleeping ones, of the buried ones--the butterfly broken on the wheel
+of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.
+
+She sat there with the whiteness of death.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+
+
+The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white
+candles of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the
+room concealed its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar
+from the faithful tree beside the house wall had need now of its
+bitter rosary.
+
+Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit--the
+debt of courtesy and gratitude.
+
+“It is a wonderful story, Frederick,” she said in a manner which
+showed him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to
+the end.
+
+“As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path
+into the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back
+what no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that
+I never dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your
+having done this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too
+much for me to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try
+to understand it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by
+waiting. But now there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to
+speak to you about that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some
+questions about the last part of the story. I have been wanting to ask
+you a long time: the story gives me the chance and--the right.”
+
+He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen.
+
+“I will answer them,” he said. “If they can be answered.”
+
+And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers passed
+to and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn out
+of the deeps of life and sinking back into them.
+
+“Frederick,” she said, “for many years we have been happy together, so
+happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us except
+the loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our
+years, lifted above life’s storms. But of course I have realized that
+sooner or later our lot must become the common one: if we did not go
+down to Sorrow, Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the
+heights it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you to-night what
+I shall: I think fate’s hour has struck for me; I am ready to hear
+it. Its arrow has already left the bow and is on its way; I open my
+heart to receive it. This is as I have always wished; I have said that
+if life had any greatest tragedy, for me, I hoped it would come when I
+was happiest; thus I should confront it all. I have never drunk half
+of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let the other half waste; I
+must go equally to the depth of any suffering.  Worse than the
+suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked some of
+it, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown myself
+a cowardly soul.”
+
+After a pause she went over this subject as though she were not
+satisfied that she had made it clear.
+
+“I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief that
+comes to us in life when life is at its best--when no one is to
+blame--when no one has committed a fault--when suffering is meted out
+to us as the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. In
+earlier years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all of
+the world’s poets felt the things that pass, even then I was wondering
+at the way in which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow it
+must be separated from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkening
+the bright disk of life’s clear tragedy, thus rendering it less
+bravely seen.
+
+“And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor play
+with mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks
+of Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf’s bane and twist the
+poison out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock;
+nor bind about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count
+over the berries of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of
+the beetle ticking in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death
+moth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl--the voice of ruins. Not
+these! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow
+are beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red peony just
+opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on the white foam, youth not
+yet faded but already fading, joy with its finger on his lips, bidding
+adieu.
+
+“And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life’s
+tragedy. And to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: _I want to be
+told_.”
+
+“If you can be told, you shall be told,” he said.
+
+She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and
+composure. Then she began:
+
+“Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college
+friend. You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and
+celebrated the German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to
+have the Christmas Tree in our house--through memory of him and of
+those years. You have often described to me how you and he in summer
+went Alpine climbing, and far up in some green valley girdled with
+glaciers lay of afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drowsing
+in the crystalline air. You told me of your nights of wandering down
+the Rhine together when the heart turns so intimately to the heart
+beside it. He was German youth and song and dream and happiness to
+you. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer over the
+crevasse, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you that
+began to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at the
+friendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret for
+him?”
+
+He answered out of the ideals of his youth:
+
+“The longer I knew him, the more I loved him.  I never tired of being
+with him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When he
+was lost, the whole world lost some of its strength and
+nobility. After all the years, if he could come back, he would find me
+unchanged--that friend of my youth!”
+
+With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:
+
+“The doctor, Herbert and Elsie’s father, our nearest neighbor, your
+closest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor;
+he is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talking
+with one another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor and
+wish him away?  Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keep
+secret from me? Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend of
+your middle life?”
+
+“The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. I
+never tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have no
+disguises with him and need none.”
+
+“The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them?
+Do they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference?  Have
+Harold and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you?
+Do you ever unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?”
+
+“The older they grow, the more I love them.  The more they interest me
+and tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with them
+and I live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming.”
+
+“Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does it
+develop in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you the
+regret to be something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad to
+toil?”
+
+“As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down the
+stag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs for
+fortune, as the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the
+cross, I follow my work, I follow my work.”
+
+“Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the world
+still morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you begin
+to tire and to think of rest?”
+
+“The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to his
+work. Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and why
+it exists at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what
+it hates; why it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless
+when it should be true; how civilized man can fight single handed
+against the ages that were his lower past--how he can develop
+self-renunciation out of selfishness and his own wisdom out of
+surrounding folly,--all these are questions that mean more and
+more. My work is but beginning and the world is morning.”
+
+“This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would you
+rather move into a new one?”
+
+“I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take its
+place. Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care more
+for it now that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were a
+ruin, I should love it best!”
+
+She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet.
+
+“Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?”
+
+“I think more of them and take better care of them now that their
+hunting days are over.”
+
+“The friend of your youth--the friend of your middle age--the
+children--your profession--the world of human life--this house--the
+dogs of the house--you care more for them all as time passes?”
+
+“I care more for them all as time passes.”
+
+Then there came a great stillness in the room--the stillness of all
+listening years.
+
+“Am I the only thing that you care less for as time passes?”
+
+There was no reply.
+
+“Am I in the way?”
+
+There was no reply.
+
+“Would you like to go over it all again with another?”
+
+There was no reply.
+
+She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against the
+end of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape
+being touched by him--to escape the blow of his words. No words
+came. There was no touch.
+
+A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, looking
+down at her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck.
+He must be kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with a
+kind of incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At first
+she could so little believe it, that with her face still buried in one
+hand she searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touch
+him.
+
+Then she cried out to him:
+
+“Isn’t there anything you can say to me?”
+
+Silence lasted.
+
+“_Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred_!”
+
+In the stillness she began to hear something--the sound of his
+footsteps moving on the carpet.  She sat up.
+
+The room was getting darker; he was putting out the candles. It was
+too dark already to see his face. With fascination she began to watch
+his hand. How steady it was as it moved among the boughs,
+extinguishing the lights. Out they went one by one and back into their
+darkness returned the emblems of darker ages--the Forest Memories.
+
+A solitary taper was left burning at the pinnacle of the Tree under
+the cross: that highest torch of love shining on everything that had
+disappeared.
+
+He quietly put it out.
+
+Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly to have travelled
+through the open parlor door into the adjoining room, her bedroom; for
+out of that there now streamed a suffused red light; it came from the
+lamp near the great bed in the shadowy corner.
+
+This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance of
+a bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with the
+weight of its own splendor falls face downward on the grass. And in
+that room this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winter
+draperies.  He had been living alone as a bachelor before he married
+her. After they became engaged he, having watched for some favorite
+color of hers, had had this room redecorated in that shade. Every
+winter since she had renewed in this way or that way these hangings,
+and now the bridal draperies remained unchanged--after the changing
+years.
+
+He replaced the taper against the wall and came over and stood before
+her, holding out his hands to help her rise.
+
+She arose without his aid and passed around him, moving toward her
+bedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, he
+followed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom and
+crossed to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping
+her face bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closed
+the door on him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with which
+the soul tears out of itself something that has been its life, she
+made a circlet of her white arms against the door and laid her profile
+within this circlet and stood--the figure of Memory.
+
+Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tomb
+where some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a far
+land,--walking some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all human
+stories end; an autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of its
+mortality and his heart singing with the bird of one lost to him--lost
+to him in his own country.
+
+On the other side of the door the silence was that of a tomb. She had
+felt confident--so far as she had expected anything--that he would
+speak to her through the door, try to open it, plead with her to open
+it. Nothing of the kind occurred.
+
+Why did he not come back? What bolt could have separated her from him?
+
+The silence began to weigh upon her.
+
+Then in the tense stillness she heard him moving quietly about,
+getting ready for bed.  There were the same movements, familiar to her
+for years. She would not open the door, she could not leave it, she
+could not stand, no support was near, and she sank to the floor and
+sat there, leaning her brow against the lintel.
+
+On the other side the quiet preparations went on.
+
+She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back of
+a chair. The buttons made a little scraping sound against the wood.
+Then he went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and he
+opened a drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking of
+a chair under him as he threw one foot and then the other up across
+his knee and took off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her the
+soft movements of his bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony the
+old impulse started in her to caution him about his slippers). Then
+followed the brushing of his teeth and the deliberate bathing of his
+hands. Then was audible the puff of breath with which he blew out his
+lamp after he had turned it low; and then,--on the other side of the
+door,--just above her ear his knock sounded.
+
+The same knock waited for and responded to throughout the years; so
+often with his little variations of playfulness. Many a time in early
+summer when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing some
+bird sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood--that tap of
+heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear.
+
+Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though her
+flesh were but will and spirit. When he knocked again, she was across
+the room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her palms pressed
+together and thrust between her knees: the instinctive act of a human
+animal suddenly chilled to the bone.
+
+The knocking sounded again.
+
+“Was there anything you needed?” she asked fearfully.
+
+There was no response but another knock.
+
+She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure that it would reach him.
+
+“Was there anything you wanted?”
+
+As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greater
+alarm, and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated her
+one question:
+
+“Did you forget anything?”
+
+Her mind refused to release itself from the iteration of that idea: it
+was some _thing_--not herself--that he wanted.
+
+He knocked.
+
+Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, now made of his knock
+some signal of distress.  It took on the authority of an appeal not to
+be denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a little way, and once
+more she asked her one poor question.
+
+His answer to it came in the form of a gentle pressure against the
+door, breaking down her resistance. As she applied more strength, this
+was as gently overcome; and when the opening was sufficient, he walked
+past her into the room.
+
+How hushed the house! How still the world outside as the cloud wove in
+darkness its mantle of light!
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+
+
+Day was breaking.
+
+The crimson curtains of the bedroom were drawn close, but from behind
+their outer edges faint flanges of light began to advance along the
+wall. It was a clear light reflected from snow which had sifted in
+against the window-panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged the
+yard fence, peaked the little gate-posts, and buried the shrubbery.
+There was no need to look out in order to know that it had stopped
+snowing, that the air was windless, and that the stars were flashing
+silver-pale except one--great golden-croziered shepherd of the thick,
+soft-footed, moving host.
+
+It was Christmas morning on the effulgent Shield.
+
+Already there was sufficient light in the room to reveal--less as
+actual things than as brown shadows of the memory--a gay company of
+socks and stockings hanging from the mantelpiece; sufficient to give
+outline to the bulk of a man asleep on the edge of the bed; and it
+exposed to view in a corner of the room farthest from the rays a woman
+sitting in a straight-backed chair, a shawl thrown about her shoulders
+over her night-dress.
+
+He always slept till he was awakened; the children, having stayed up
+past their usual bedtime, would sleep late also; she had the white
+dawn to herself in quietness.
+
+She needed it.
+
+Sleep could not have come to her had she wished. She had not slept and
+she had not lain down, and the sole endeavor during those shattered
+hours had been to prepare herself for his awakening. She was not yet
+ready--she felt that during the rest of her life she should never be
+quite ready to meet him again. Scant time remained now.
+
+Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment and outdoor noises would
+begin. Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of its
+size, rose by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town was
+proud of its smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields;
+whereever any hamlet marked the point at which two country roads this
+morning made the sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudly
+castled on woody hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder from
+amid their olive-dark winter pastures; or far away on the shaggy
+uplift of the Shield wherever any cabin clung like a swallow’s nest
+against the gray Appalachian wall--everywhere soon would begin the
+healthy outbreak of joy among men and women and children--glad about
+themselves, glad in one another, glad of human life in a happy
+world. The many-voiced roar and din of this warm carnival lay not far
+away from her across the cold bar of silence.
+
+Soon within the house likewise the rush of the children’s feet would
+startle her ear; they would be tugging at the door, tugging at her
+heart.  And as she thought of this, the recollection of old simple
+things came pealing back to her from behind life’s hills. The years
+parted like naked frozen reeds, and she, sorely stricken in her
+womanhood, fled backward till she herself was a child again--safe in
+her father’s and mother’s protection. It was Christmas morning, and
+she in bare feet was tipping over the cold floors toward their
+bedroom--toward her stockings.
+
+Her father and mother! How she needed them at this moment: they had
+been sweethearts all their lives. One picture of them rose with
+distinctness before her--for the wounding picture always comes to the
+wounded moment. She saw them sitting in their pew far down toward the
+chancel. Through a stained glass window (where there was a ladder of
+angels) the light fell softly on them--both silver-haired; and as with
+the voices of children they were singing out of one book. She
+remembered how as she sat between them she had observed her father
+slip his hand into her mother’s lap and clasp hers with a
+steadfastness that wedded her for eternity; and thus over their linked
+hands, with the love of their youth within them and the snows of the
+years upon them, they sang together:
+
+  “Gently, Lord, O gently lead us
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+  “Through the changes Thou’st decreed us.”
+
+Her father and mother had not been led gently.  They had known more
+than common share of life’s shocks and violence, its wrongs and
+meannesses and ills and griefs. But their faith had never wavered that
+they were being led gently; so long as they were led together, to them
+it was gentle leading: the richer each in each for aught whereby
+nature or man could leave them poorer; the calmer for the shocks; the
+sweeter for the sour; the finer with one another because of life’s
+rudenesses.  In after years she often thought of them as faithful in
+their dust; and the flowers she planted over them and watered many a
+bright day with happy tears brought up to her in another form the
+freshness of their unwearied union.
+
+That was what she had not doubted her own life would be--with
+him--when she had married him.
+
+From the moment of the night before when he had forced the door open
+and entered her room, they had not exchanged any words nor a glance.
+He had lain down and soon fallen asleep; apparently he had offered
+that to her as for the moment at least his solution of the
+matter--that he should leave her to herself and absent himself in
+slumber.
+
+The instant she knew him to be asleep she set about her preparations.
+
+Before he awoke she must be gone--out of the house--anywhere--to save
+herself from living any longer with him. His indifference in the
+presence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touch
+and glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life’s
+valleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing the
+whole truth, know it she should: all this left her wounded and stunned
+as by an incredible blow, and she was acting first from the instinct
+of removing herself beyond the reach of further humiliation and
+brutality.
+
+Instinctively she took off her wedding ring and laid it on his dresser
+beside his watch: he would find it there in the morning and he could
+dispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the plainest heavy one
+and put on heavy walking shoes. She packed into a handbag a few
+necessary things with some heirlooms of her own. Among the latter was
+a case of family jewels; and as she opened it, her eyes fell upon her
+mother’s thin wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped that
+on and kissed it bitterly. She lifted out also her mother’s locket
+containing a miniature daguerreotype of her father and dutifully fed
+her eyes on that. Her father was not silver-haired then, but
+raven-locked; with eyes that men feared at times but no woman ever.
+
+His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbed
+her exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she,
+coarsely wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, opened
+her front door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, and
+passed out--wading away. Those eyes of his saw what took place the
+next day: the happiness of Christmas morning turned into horror; the
+children wild with distress and crying--the servants dumb--the inquiry
+at neighbors’ houses--the news spreading to the town--the papers--the
+black ruin. And from him two restraining words issued for her ear:
+
+“My daughter!”
+
+Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answered
+him. And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her blood
+took fire and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. She
+stopped her preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel.
+
+She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its
+place with exaggerated pains.  Having done this, she stood in the
+middle of the floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to
+that power of low suggestion which is one of anger’s weapons, she
+began to devise malice.  She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took
+from a bottom drawer--where long ago it had been stored away under
+everything else--a shawl that had been her grandmother’s; a brindled
+crewel shawl,--sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former
+generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she
+had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her
+ugliness and decrepitude.
+
+She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around
+her shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting
+it off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She
+turned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge
+lidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew
+a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put her
+forefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding places
+under the mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let these
+hang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefully
+nourished look of youth from her face--dropped the will to look
+young--and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it--into the
+wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, assisting each other so
+ably, had wrought in her.
+
+She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of
+the lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in
+exultation of vengeance that she was to live on there in his
+house--_his_ house.
+
+After a while a darker mood came over her.
+
+With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the
+room. She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it
+would be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber
+was heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat--with
+furtive look to see whether he observed her.
+
+A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.
+
+Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was
+Anglo-Saxon blood of the world’s fiercest; floating in the tide of it
+passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in
+tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but
+fiercest ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A
+thousand years from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting
+beside some sleeping father of hers in their forest-beleaguered
+castle--the moonlight streaming in upon him through the javelined
+casement and putting before her the manly beauty of him--the blond
+hair matted thick on his forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth
+reddening in his slumber under its curling gold--some mother of hers
+whom he had carried off from other men by might of his sword, thus
+sitting beside him and knowing him to be colder to her now than the
+moon’s dead rays, might have watched those rays as they travelled away
+from his figure and put a gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousand
+years ago: some mother of hers.
+
+It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers
+so often to take its place.  The best and the worst--these are the
+sole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making:
+hence life’s spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever
+present about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the
+best as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to the
+standard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one may
+think of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the story
+that it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far:
+how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many a
+time they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabit
+such a privileged highland.
+
+During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the
+tragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a
+height of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to
+the lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or
+as the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as is
+unfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed the
+grateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light. All evil
+prompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be
+justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she was
+dragging herself out of life’s quicksands upward to some rock, where
+there might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness.
+The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatred
+is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needs
+not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.
+
+He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its
+faithlessness and low carnal propensities.  What rankled most
+poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact
+that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain
+tops--that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling
+near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable
+to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now
+his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words
+about the growth of the world’s spirit--about the sacrifice of the
+lower in ourselves to the higher--this cant now became to her the
+invocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carried
+the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of
+Immortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality.
+
+Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with
+spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when
+he had let her know that he wanted to be free--at that moment she
+might tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his
+unworthiness.
+
+And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the
+devil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.
+
+Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon
+companions. And at one period of the night she began to look back upon
+her experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity--to see it as
+a story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the
+first stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way into
+the care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the
+confidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and that
+receive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novels
+of the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent years
+studied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation’s press, the
+nation’s science of medicine, the nation’s science of law, the
+nation’s practice of religion, and the nation’s imaginative literature
+were all at work with the same national omen--the decay of the
+American family and the downfall of the home.
+
+Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had
+incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where
+the older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation
+rock. The corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited
+her; and thus to-night she took her place among those women whom the
+world first hears of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of
+refuge and in their graves--and more sadly elsewhere; whose
+misfortunes interested the press and whose types attracted the
+novelists.
+
+She was one of them.
+
+They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who
+unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity--or walks
+into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under
+another name or with another lot lives on--devoting herself to memory
+or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to
+the world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains
+to her but living apart--on the other side of the locked door; the
+woman who stays on without locking the door, half-hating,
+half-loving--the accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who
+welcomes the end of the love-drama as the beginning of peace and the
+cessation of annoyances; the woman who begins to act her tragedy to
+servants and children and acquaintances--reaping sympathy for herself
+and sowing ruin and torture--for him; the woman who drops the care of
+house, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value
+as at least an investment toward his general well-being; the woman who
+endeavors to rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh
+fascinations; the woman who plays upon jealousy and touches the male
+instinct to keep one’s own though little prized lest another acquire
+it and prize it more; the woman who sets a watch to discover the other
+woman: they swarmed about her, she identified each.
+
+And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their
+companionship; a strange dread moved her lest _they_ should
+discover _her_. One only she detached from the throng and for a
+while withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who
+when so rejected turns to another man--the man who is waiting
+somewhere near.
+
+The man _she_ turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the
+country doctor, her husband’s tried and closest friend, whose children
+were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years
+_her_ secret had been--the doctor.  When she had come as a bride
+into that neighborhood, he, her husband’s senior by several years, was
+already well established in his practice. He had attended her at the
+birth of her first child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had
+discovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This had
+dealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and he
+welcomed the wound.
+
+Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from
+the turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep
+alongside her, she could hear the doctor’s buggy passing on its way to
+some patient, or on its return from the town where he had patients
+also. Many a time she had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of
+his life there turned in to her. There were nights of pitch darkness
+and beating rain; and sometimes on these she had to know that he was
+out there.
+
+Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where
+her husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the
+doctor. He would be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with
+him.
+
+Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and enveloped
+it. She groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old lost
+human paths.
+
+The endless night scarcely moved on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was wearied out, she was exhausted.  There is anger of such
+intensity that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations that
+are its fuel; nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame,
+and being unfed, it dies out.  Moreover, it is the destiny of a
+portion of mankind that they are enjoined by their very nobility from
+winning low battles; these always go against them: the only victories
+for them are won when they are leading the higher forces of human
+nature in life’s upward conflicts.
+
+She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neither
+moral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundless
+plain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm;
+and slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like
+the radiance of the storm-winged sky.
+
+And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures
+appeared--her children.  Hitherto the energies of her mind had
+grappled with the problem of her future; now memories began--memories
+that decide more perhaps than anything else for us. And memories began
+with her children.
+
+She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it
+with the palm of her hand, started upstairs.
+
+There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear
+stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the
+broad stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit
+she started to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew
+back. This room had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the
+Years. She shrank from it as one who has been arraigned may shrink
+from a tribunal where sentence has been pronounced which changes the
+rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, but
+deepened the derision and the bitterness. And the evergreen there in
+the middle of the room--it became to her as that tree of the knowledge
+of good and evil which at Creation’s morning had driven Woman from
+Paradise.
+
+She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house,
+but paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he
+should awake in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was?
+Would he call out to her--with what voice? Would he come to seek
+her--with what emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now--the
+drift back to the old mooring.)
+
+Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear of
+remembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to
+the last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seek
+her. It had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room to
+room for the delight of proving how persistently he would prolong his
+search. But one day some two years before this, when she had entered
+his study about the usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for his
+writing desk, she saw him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on,
+making some notes. The sight had struck the flowers from her hands;
+she swiftly gathered them up, and going to her room, shut herself in;
+she knew it was the beginning of the end.
+
+The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre of
+the bedchamber.
+
+When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he had
+done or failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself.
+Everything else had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; the
+old touch abandoning the hands; less time for her in the house, more
+for work; constraint beginning between them, the awkwardness of
+reserve; she seeing Nature’s movement yet refusing to believe it; then
+at last resolving to know to the uttermost and choosing her bridal
+night as the hour of the ordeal.
+
+If he awoke, would he come to seek her--with what feelings?
+
+She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her right
+hand and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There was
+a turn in the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle rays
+fell on the face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on a
+step, putting the candle beside her; and there she remained, her
+elbows on her knees, her face resting on her palms; and into the abyss
+of the night dropped the tranquil strokes. More memories!
+
+She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding
+lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness
+overflowing its dumb environs--humanizing these--drawing them toward
+her by a gracious responsive symbolism--extending speech over realms
+which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have struck
+into speechlessness long æons past.
+
+She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden God of Hours; she had
+often feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of it
+she would pin inside the walls little clusters of blossoms as votive
+offerings: if it would only move faster and bring him home!  The usual
+hour of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She had
+symbolized that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for the
+children--the three in one--the trinity of the household.
+
+She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her.
+
+The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him,
+up to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: all
+is well!
+
+It was the first sound that had reached her from any source during
+this agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outside
+humanity; from Time itself which brings us together and holds us
+together as long as possible and then separates us and goes on its
+way--indifferent whether we are together or apart; Time which welds
+the sands into the rock and then wears the rock away to its separate
+sands and sends the level tide softly over them.
+
+Once for him, once for her, once for the children!  She took up the
+candle and went upstairs to them.
+
+For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two little
+girls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and in
+another room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turned
+on one another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fist
+outside the cover. In a few years how differently the four would be
+divided and paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife;
+and out of the lives of the two of them who were hers she would then
+drop into some second place. If to-night she were realizing what
+befalls a wife when she becomes the Incident to her husband, she would
+then realize what befalls a woman when the mother becomes the Incident
+to her children: Woman, twice the Incident in Nature’s impartial
+economy! Her son would playfully confide it to his bride that she must
+bear with his mother’s whims and ways. Her daughter would caution her
+husband that he must overlook peculiarities and weaknesses. The very
+study of perfection which she herself had kindled and fanned in them
+as the illumination of their lives they would now turn upon her as a
+searchlight of her failings.
+
+He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of his
+discussing her with any human being. Even though he should some day
+desert her, he would never discuss her.
+
+She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with her
+against the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strength
+from her to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow.  But now she
+began to ask herself whether his protection _had_ failed her.
+Could he have recognized the situation without rendering it
+worse?  Had he put his arms around her, might she not have--struck at
+him? Had he laid a finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not have
+left a scar for life? Any words of his, would they not have rung in
+her ears unceasingly? To pass it over was as though it had never
+been--was not _that_ his protection?
+
+She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed her
+child in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor’s
+children--with memory of their mother; and then she descended by the
+rear stairway.
+
+She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she had
+placed the lamp--near the manuscript--and she sat down and looked at
+that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there.
+
+He had made her the gift of his work--dedicated to her the triumphs of
+his toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his widening
+career and enter with him into the world’s service.  She crossed her
+hands over it awhile, and then she left it.
+
+The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the
+immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.
+After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the
+echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music
+only,--the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She
+sat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear
+began faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of his story.
+
+One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watch
+the youth of the hemp--a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If
+the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulse
+swayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads
+were instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and east
+wind sent it west.
+
+And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we
+sometimes call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It is
+run through by many different laws; governed by many distinct forces,
+each of which strives to control it wholly--but never does.
+Selfishness blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all things
+seem to bow to the might of selfishness. Generosity moves across the
+expanse, and all things are seen responsive to what is generous. Place
+yourself where life is lowest and everything like an avalanche is
+rushing to the bottom. Place yourself where character is highest, and
+lo! the whole world is but one struggle upward to what is high. You
+see what you care to see, and find what you wish to find.
+
+In his story of the Forest and the Heart he had wanted to trace but
+one law, and he had traced it; he had drawn all things together and
+bent them before its majesty: the ancient law of Sacrifice. Of old the
+high sacrificed to the low; afterwards the low to the high: once the
+sacrifice of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but always in
+ourselves of the lower to the higher in order that, dying, we may
+live.
+
+With this law he had made his story a story of the world.
+
+The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldæa; the candle bore it to
+ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the
+dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it
+to Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and
+Rome; the doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe
+to Britain,--and all brought it to Christ,--Christ the latest
+world-ideal of sacrifice that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of
+all for all.
+
+The story was for herself, he had said, and for himself.
+
+Himself! Here at last all her pain and wandering of this night ended:
+at the bottom of her wound where rankled _his problem_.
+
+From this problem she had most shrunk and into this she now entered:
+She sacrificed herself in him! She laid upon herself his temptation
+and his struggle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Taking her candle, she passed back into her bedroom and screened it
+where she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom.
+
+She put her wedding ring on again with blanched lips. She went to his
+bedside, and drawing to the pillow the chair on which his clothes were
+piled, sat down and laid her face over on it; and there in that shrine
+of feeling where speech is formed, but whence it never issues, she
+made her last communion with him:
+
+_“You, to whom I gave my youth and all that youth could mean to me;
+whose children I have borne and nurtured at my breast--all of whose
+eyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of whom I have closed;
+husband of my girlhood, loved as no woman ever loved the man who took
+her home; strength and laughter of his house; helper of what is best
+in me; my defender against things in myself that I cannot govern;
+pathfinder of my future; rock of the ebbing years! Though my hair turn
+white as driven snow and flesh wither to the bone, I shall never cease
+to be the flame that you yourself have kindled.
+
+“But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where there
+must be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heard
+our whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences--the
+Long Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clung
+to!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!”_
+
+She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would
+not lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his
+pillow the last drop of things that must go.
+
+She there--her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life’s
+Calvary of the Snows.
+
+The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, and
+there it brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near when
+she must awaken him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over before
+the children rushed downstairs or the servants knocked.
+
+She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the
+gray told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly
+away from brow and temples so that the contour of her head--one of
+nature’s noblest--was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the
+women of her land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of
+their baptism into a new life.
+
+She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders rising
+out of this had the austerity of marble--exempt not from ruin, but
+exempt from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once and
+made a little instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide them
+under the sleeves.
+
+Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and
+quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it.
+Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes--the look
+of the rejected.
+
+So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed,
+resting on one elbow and looking down at him.
+
+For years her first words to him on this day had been the world’s best
+greeting:
+
+“A Merry Christmas!”
+
+She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready.
+
+At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and
+instantly looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out
+of it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what their future
+would be worth. But at the sight of her so changed--something so gone
+out of her forever--with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She
+struggled to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly
+about the youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his
+face. She caught at one of the braids of her hair and threw it across
+her eyes, and then silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her.
+The torrent of her tears raining down into his tears.
+
+Tears not for Life’s faults but for Life when there are no
+faults. They locked in each other’s arms--trying to save each other on
+Nature’s vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea.
+
+The rush of children’s feet was heard in the hall and there was
+smothered laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob.
+
+It was Christmas Morning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward over
+the gladness of the Shield.  The farmhouse--such as the poet had sung
+of when he could not help singing of American home life--looked out
+from under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller
+who laughs at the snow on his hat and shoulders.  Smoke poured out of
+its chimneys, bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak
+tree beside it stood quieted of its moaning and tossing.  Soon after
+sunrise a soul of passion on scarlet wings, rising out of the
+snow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a topmost twig of the oak; and
+sitting there with its breast to the gorgeous sun scanned for a little
+while that landscape of ice. It was beyond its intelligence to
+understand how nature could create it for Summer and then take Summer
+away. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a sun so
+true could shine on a world so false.
+
+Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovelling
+paths. After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with
+fireside warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat,
+rushed out of the front door pursued by a little soldier sternly
+booted and capped and gloved; and the two snowballed each other, going
+at it furiously. Watching them through a window a little girl, dancing
+a dreamy measure of her own, ever turned inward and beckoned to some
+one to come and look--beckoned in vain.
+
+All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the little
+girl played with the doll--hugged to her breast the symbol of ancient
+sacrifice, the emblem of the world’s new mercy. Along the turnpike
+sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and the
+shouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across the
+shining valleys.
+
+Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!
+
+One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from its
+surroundings; just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low,
+thick, covered with snow except where a bough had been broken off for
+decorating the house; here owing to the steepness the snow slid
+off. The spot looked like a wound in the side of the Divine purity,
+and across this open wound the tree had hung its rosary-beads never to
+be told by Sorrow’s fingers.
+
+The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backward
+across the sadness of the Shield.  One by one the stars came back to
+their faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinging
+lamp was lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little round
+mats of snow stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost a
+low Christmas star was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; and
+between those beacons soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and
+children assembling for the party.
+
+Late into the night the party lasted.
+
+The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went to
+ashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and the
+robust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of our
+life. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate and
+drank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to go
+faster than the music.
+
+The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on the
+Christmas Tree--the handing over to this person and to that person of
+those unread lessons of the ages--little mummied packages of the lord
+of time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced those
+burnt out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were white
+now.
+
+Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene!
+Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house:
+hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughing
+and talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to the
+doctor’s wife--faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be the
+American wife and mother in the home of the poet’s dream: the
+spiritual majesty of her bridal veil still about her amid life’s snow
+as it never lifts itself from the face of the _Jungfrau_ amid the
+sad most lovely mountains: the American wife and mother!--herself the
+_Jungfrau_ among the world’s women!
+
+The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takes
+place there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the State
+which is also a song of the Nation--its melody of the unfallen home:
+with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated at
+the piano--the others upholding her like a living bulwark.
+
+There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of:
+those Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the
+embodied--the Guests of the Imagination.
+
+The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambers
+arm and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that present
+scene nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree the
+Wraiths of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naught
+of those later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to fill
+their places. Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes
+that bent undivided attention upon the actual pageant: these were
+Life’s Pities. Ever and anon they would lift their noble veils and
+look out upon that brief flicker of our mortal joy, and drop them and
+relapse into their compassionate vigil.
+
+But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filled
+the entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through the
+rooms with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckoned
+her to a place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered back
+peeped shyly at her but then with some sure instinct of recognition
+ran to her and threw down their gifts, to put their arms around
+her. And the Pities before they left the house that night walked past
+her one by one and each lifted its veil and dropped it more softly.
+
+This was the Shape:
+
+In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet under the
+chandelier--which had no decoration whatsoever--stood an exquisite
+Spirit of Youth, more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet most
+alive; her lips scarce parted--her skin like white hawthorn shadowed
+by pink--in her eyes the modesty of withdrawal from Love--in her heart
+the surrender to it. During those distracting hours never did she move
+nor did her look once change: she waiting there--waiting for some one
+to come--waiting.
+
+Waiting.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
+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: Bride of the Mistletoe
+
+Author: James Lane Allen
+
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9179]
+This file was first posted on September 11, 2003
+Last updated: April 30, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE
+
+By James Lane Allen
+
+
+
+Author Of "Flute And Violin," "A Kentucky Cardinal," "Aftermath," Etc.
+
+
+
+TO ONE WHO KNOWS
+
+
+Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raissoner.  Mais il
+faut regarder beaucoup et songer � ce qu'on a vu.  Voir: tout est l�,
+et voir juste. J'entends, par voir juste, voir avec ses propres yeux
+et non avec ceux des ma�tres.  L'originalit� d'un artiste s'indique
+d'abord dans les petites choses et non dans les grandes.
+
+Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n'a pas encore
+d�couverte et t�cher de l'exprimer d'une fa�on personelle.
+
+--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Any one about to read this work of fiction might properly be apprised
+beforehand that it is not a novel: it has neither the structure nor
+the purpose of The Novel.
+
+It is a story. There are two characters--a middle-aged married couple
+living in a plain farmhouse; one point on the field of human nature is
+located; at that point one subject is treated; in the treatment one
+movement is directed toward one climax; no external event whatsoever
+is introduced; and the time is about forty hours.
+
+A second story of equal length, laid in the same house, is expected to
+appear within a twelvemonth. The same father and mother are
+characters, and the family friend the country doctor; but
+subordinately all. The main story concerns itself with the four
+children of the two households.
+
+It is an American children's story:
+
+"A Brood of The Eagle."
+
+During the year a third work, not fiction, will be published,
+entitled:
+
+"The Christmas Tree: An Interpretation."
+
+The three works will serve to complete each other, and they complete a
+cycle of the theme.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+       EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+
+    I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+
+   II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+
+  III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+
+   IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+
+    V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+
+   VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+
+
+
+
+EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+
+
+A mighty table-land lies southward in a hardy region of our country.
+It has the form of a colossal Shield, lacking and broken in some of
+its outlines and rough and rude of make. Nature forged it for some
+crisis in her long warfare of time and change, made use of it, and so
+left it lying as one of her ancient battle-pieces--Kentucky.
+
+The great Shield is raised high out of the earth at one end and sunk
+deep into it at the other. It is tilted away from the dawn toward the
+sunset.  Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet, Nature,
+cunning artificer, set the stream of ocean flowing past with restless
+foam--the Father of Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound a
+bright river to the rim of silver. And where the eastern part rises
+loftiest on the horizon, turned away from the reddening daybreak, she
+piled shaggy mountains wooded with trees that loose their leaves ere
+snowflakes fly and with steadfast evergreens which hold to theirs
+through the gladdening and the saddening year. Then crosswise over the
+middle of the Shield, northward and southward upon the breadth of it,
+covering the life-born rock of many thicknesses, she drew a tough skin
+of verdure--a broad strip of hide of the ever growing grass. She
+embossed noble forests on this greensward and under the forests drew
+clear waters.
+
+This she did in a time of which we know nothing--uncharted ages before
+man had emerged from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder, thoughts
+to wander, heart to love, and spirit to pray. Many a scene the same
+power has wrought out upon the surface of the Shield since she brought
+him forth and set him there: many an old one, many a new. She has made
+it sometimes a Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace.  Nor has
+she yet finished with its destinies as she has not yet finished with
+anything in the universe.  While therefore she continues her will and
+pleasure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not forget the
+Shield.
+
+She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which admonish man how
+little his lot has changed since Hephaistos wrought like scenes upon
+the shield of Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like a
+falcon from snowy Olympus bearing the glittering piece of armor to her
+angered son.
+
+These are some of the scenes that were wrought on the shield of
+Achilles and that to-day are spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky:
+
+Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze of lights as they lead the
+bride from her chamber, flutes and violins sounding merrily. An
+assembly-place where the people are gathered, a strife having arisen
+about the blood-price of a man slain; the old lawyers stand up one
+after another and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, freshly
+ploughed fields where ploughmen drive their teams to and fro, the
+earth growing dark behind the share. The estate of a landowner where
+laborers are reaping; some armfuls the binders are binding with
+twisted bands of straw: among them the farmer is standing in silence,
+leaning on his staff, rejoicing in his heart. Vineyards with purpling
+clusters and happy folk gathering these in plaited baskets on sunny
+afternoons.  A herd of cattle with incurved horns hurrying from the
+stable to the woods where there is running water and where
+purple-topped weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen with white
+sheep. A dancing-place under the trees; girls and young men dancing,
+their fingers on one another's wrists: a great company stands watching
+the lovely dance of joy.
+
+Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles as art; as pageants
+of life they appear on the Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker of
+old wrought them upon the armor of the Greek warrior in tin and
+silver, bronze and gold. The world-designer sets them to-day on the
+throbbing land in nerve and blood, toil and delight and passion. But
+there with the old things she mingles new things, with the never
+changing the ever changing; for the old that remains always the new
+and the new that perpetually becomes old--these Nature allots to man
+as his two portions wherewith he must abide steadfast in what he is
+and go upward or go downward through all that he is to become.
+
+But of the many scenes which she in our time sets forth upon the
+stately grassy Shield there is a single spectacle that she spreads
+over the length and breadth of it once every year now as best liked by
+the entire people; and this is both old and new.
+
+It is old because it contains man's faith in his immortality, which
+was venerable with age before the shield of Achilles ever grew
+effulgent before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new because it
+contains those latest hopes and reasons for this faith, which briefly
+blossom out upon the primitive stock with the altering years and soon
+are blown away upon the winds of change. Since this spectacle, this
+festival, is thus old and is thus new and thus enwraps the deepest
+thing in the human spirit, it is never forgotten.
+
+When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or sows in the teeth of the
+wind and glances at the fickle sky; when under the summer shade of a
+flowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted herds and fattening
+grain; whether there is autumnal plenty in his barn or autumnal
+emptiness, autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal strife,--all days
+of the year, in the assembly-place, in the dancing-place, whatsoever
+of good or ill befall in mind or hand, never does one forget.
+
+When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seems
+farthest from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when the
+fields lie shorn between harvest-time and seed-time and man turns
+wistful eyes back and forth between the mystery of his origin and the
+mystery of his end,--then comes the great pageant of the winter
+solstice, then comes Christmas.
+
+So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differing
+but always identical mortals?
+
+It was once the old pagan festival of dead Nature. It was once the old
+pagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival when
+the hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It was
+the pagan festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants of
+an upper world upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, and
+the production of a race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is now
+the festival of the Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortal
+children. It is now the new festival of man's remembrance of his
+errors and his charity toward erring neighbors. It has latterly become
+the widening festival of universal brotherhood with succor for all
+need and nighness to all suffering; of good will warring against ill
+will and of peace warring upon war.
+
+And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the
+festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it
+is on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an
+age to many people--the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen;
+setting forth man's pathetic love of youth--of his own youth that will
+not stay with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds its
+ancient way upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light.
+
+This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield.
+
+
+
+
+I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+
+
+A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country a
+few years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
+
+One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the desk
+near his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing and
+turned the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of his
+mental travels--for such he followed--was now passing through the
+evergreens.
+
+Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned there
+like short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths and
+customs of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper,
+as gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the large
+one.  It dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the
+class of those that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which
+possess them as unsafe reading for unsafe minds.
+
+Sheets of paper covered with the man's clear, deliberate handwriting
+lay thickly on the desk.  A table in the centre of the room was strewn
+with volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On the
+tops of two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representing
+scenes from the oldest known art of the East. These and other prints
+hanging about the walls, however remote from each other in the times
+and places where they had been gathered, brought together in this room
+of a quiet Kentucky farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object:
+the subject related in general to trees and in especial evergreens.
+
+While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to be
+submerged. His left hand was always going out to one or the other of
+three picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly.
+
+Two of these frames held photographs of four young children--a boy and
+a girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being well
+enough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unruly
+and disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of them
+looked straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American frankness
+and good humor; all had mouths shut tight with American energy and
+determination. Apparently they already believed that the New World was
+behind them, that the nation backed them up. In a way you believed
+it. You accepted them on the spot as embodying that marvellous
+precocity in American children, through which they early in life
+become conscious of the country and claim it their country and believe
+that it claims them. Thus they took on the distinction of being a
+squad detached only photographically from the rank and file of the
+white armies of the young in the New World, millions and millions
+strong, as they march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous, magnificent,
+toward new times and new destinies for the nation and for humanity--a
+kinder knowledge of man and a kinder ignorance of God.
+
+The third frame held the picture of a woman probably thirty years of
+age. Her features were without noticeable American characteristics.
+What human traits you saw depended upon what human traits you saw
+with.
+
+The hair was dark and abundant, the brows dark and strong. And the
+lashes were dark and strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornily
+hedged about, somehow brought up before you a picture of autumn
+thistles--thistles that look out from the shadow of a rock. They had a
+veritable thistle quality and suggestiveness: gray and of the fields,
+sure of their experience in nature, freighted with silence.
+
+Despite grayness and thorniness, however, you saw that they were in
+the summer of their life-bloom; and singularly above even their beauty
+of blooming they held what is rare in the eyes of either men or
+women--they held a look of being just.
+
+The whole face was an oval, long, regular, high-bred. If the lower
+part had been hidden behind a white veil of the Orient (by that little
+bank of snow which is guardedly built in front of the overflowing
+desires of the mouth), the upper part would have given the impression
+of reserve, coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that one
+look--the garnered wisdom, the tempering justice, of the eyes. The
+whole face being seen, the lower features altered the impression made
+by the upper ones; reserve became bettered into strength, coldness
+bettered into dignity, severity of intellect transfused into glowing
+nobleness of character. The look of virgin justice in her was perhaps
+what had survived from that white light of life which falls upon young
+children as from a receding sun and touches lingeringly their smiles
+and glances; but her mouth had gathered its shadowy tenderness as she
+walked the furrows of the years, watching their changeful harvests,
+eating their passing bread.
+
+A handful of some of the green things of winter lay before her
+picture: holly boughs with their bold, upright red berries; a spray of
+the cedar of the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous blue. When
+he had come in from out of doors to go on with his work, he had put
+them there--perhaps as some tribute. After all his years with her,
+many and strong, he must have acquired various tributes and
+interpretations; but to-day, during his walk in the woods, it had
+befallen him to think of her as holly which ripens amid snows and
+retains its brave freshness on a landscape of departed things. As
+cedar also which everywhere on the Shield is the best loved of
+forest-growths to be the companion of household walls; so that even
+the poorest of the people, if it does not grow near the spot they
+build in, hunt for it and bring it home: everywhere wife and cedar,
+wife and cedar, wife and cedar.
+
+The photographs of the children grouped on each side of hers with
+heads a little lower down called up memories of Old World pictures in
+which cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet of the heavenly Hebrew
+maid. Glowing young American mother with four healthy children as her
+gifts to the nation--this was the practical thought of her that
+riveted and held.
+
+As has been said, they were in two groups, the children; a boy and
+girl in each. The four were of nearly the same age; but the faces of
+two were on a dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced at her again
+and persuaded yourself that the expression of motherhood which
+characterized her separated into two expressions (as behind a thin
+white cloud it is possible to watch another cloud of darker
+hue). Nearer in time was the countenance of a mother happy with happy
+offspring; further away the same countenance withdrawn a little into
+shadow--the face of the mother bereaved--mute and changeless.
+
+The man, the worker, whom this little flock of wife and two surviving
+children now followed through the world as their leader, sat with his
+face toward his desk In a corner of the room; solidly squared before
+his undertaking, liking it, mastering it; seldom changing his position
+as the minutes passed, never nervously; with a quietude in him that
+was oftener in Southern gentlemen in quieter, more gentlemanly
+times. A low powerful figure with a pair of thick shoulders and
+tremendous limbs; filling the room with his vitality as a heavy
+passionate animal lying in a corner of a cage fills the space of the
+cage, so that you wait for it to roll over or get up on its feet and
+walk about that you may study its markings and get an inkling of its
+conquering nature.
+
+Meantime there were hints of him. When he had come in, he had thrown
+his overcoat on a chair that stood near the table in the centre of the
+room and had dropped his hat upon his coat.  It had slipped to the
+floor and now lay there--a low, soft black hat of a kind formerly much
+worn by young Southerners of the countryside,--especially on occasions
+when there was a spur of heat in their mood and going,--much the same
+kind that one sees on the heads of students in Rome in winter; light,
+warm, shaping itself readily to breezes from any quarter, to be doffed
+or donned as comfortable and negligible. It suggested that he had been
+a country boy in the land, still belonged to the land, and as a man
+kept to its out-of-door habits and fashions. His shoes, one of which
+you saw at each side of his chair, were especially well made for
+rough-going feet to tramp in during all weathers.
+
+A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped to withdraw your
+interpretation of him from farm life to the arts or the
+professions. The scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing against
+the clear-hued flesh at the back of his neck, and the Van Dyck-like
+edge of the shirt cuff, defining his powerful wrist and hand,
+strengthened the notion that he belonged to the arts or to the
+professions. He might have been sitting before a canvas instead of a
+desk and holding a brush instead of a pen: the picture would have been
+true to life. Or truer yet, he might have taken his place with the
+grave group of students in the Lesson in Anatomy left by Rembrandt.
+
+Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair about, and began to read
+the page he had just finished: then you saw him. He had a big,
+masculine, solid-cut, self-respecting, normal-looking, executive
+head--covered with thick yellowish hair clipped short; so that while
+everything else in his appearance indicated that he was in the prime
+of manhood, the clipped hair caused him to appear still more youthful;
+and it invested him with a rustic atmosphere which went along very
+naturally with the sentimental country hat and the all-weather
+shoes. He seemed at first impression a magnificent animal frankly
+loved of the sun--perhaps too warmly. The sun itself seemed to have
+colored for him his beard and mustache--a characteristic hue of men's
+hair and beard in this land peopled from Old English stock. The beard,
+like the hair, was cut short, as though his idea might have been to
+get both hair and beard out of life's daily way; but his mustache
+curled thickly down over his mouth, hiding it. In the whole effect
+there was a suggestion of the Continent, perhaps of a former student
+career in Germany, memories of which may still have lasted with him
+and the marks of which may have purposely been kept up in his
+appearance.
+
+But such a fashion of beard, while covering a man's face, does much to
+uncover the man. As he sat amid his papers and books, your thought
+surely led again to old pictures where earnest heads bend together
+over some point on the human road, at which knowledge widens and
+suffering begins to be made more bearable and death more
+kind. Perforce now you interpreted him and fixed his general working
+category: that he was absorbed in work meant to be serviceable to
+humanity. His house, the members of his family, the people of his
+neighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere dweller on
+his farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the race
+forever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows.
+
+He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped its
+responsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests.
+The look of the student left his face; over it began to play the soft
+lights of the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for his
+own place in the world; the student had become the husband and
+house-father. A few moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his work
+again, his right hand took up the pen, his left hand went back to the
+pictures.
+
+The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he were
+being watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed.
+(He had the reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that he
+is idolized.)
+
+Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immense
+oak tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminder
+of vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, the
+straining and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcries
+for the wild life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, an
+image of forest reflection.  Once a small black-and-white sapsucker,
+circling the trunk and peering into the crevices of the bark on a
+level with the windows, uttered minute notes which penetrated into the
+room like steel darts of sound. A snowbird alighted on the
+window-sill, glanced familiarly in at the man, and shot up its crest;
+but disappointed perhaps that it was not noticed, quoted its resigned
+gray phrase--a phrase it had made for itself to accompany the score of
+gray whiter--and flitted on billowy wings to a juniper at the corner
+of the house, its turret against the long javelins of the North.
+
+Amid the stillness of Nature outside and the house-silence of a love
+guarding him within, the man worked on.
+
+A little clock ticked independently on the old-fashioned Parian marble
+mantelpiece. Prints were propped against its sides and face,
+illustrating the use of trees about ancient tombs and temples.  Out of
+this photographic grove of dead things the uncaring clock threw out
+upon the air a living three--the fateful three that had been measured
+for each tomb and temple in its own land and time.
+
+A knock, regretful but positive, was heard, and the door opening into
+the hall was quietly pushed open. A glow lit up the student's face
+though he did not stop writing; and his voice, while it gave a
+welcome, unconsciously expressed regret at being disturbed:
+
+"Come in."
+
+"I am in!"
+
+He lifted his heavy figure with instant courtesy--rather obsolete
+now--and bowing to one side, sat down again.
+
+"So I see," he said, dipping his pen into his ink.
+
+"Since you did not turn around, you would better have said 'So I
+hear.' It is three o'clock."
+
+"So I hear."
+
+"You said you would be ready."
+
+"I am ready."
+
+"You said you would be done."
+
+"I am done--nearly done."
+
+"How nearly?"
+
+"By to-morrow--to-morrow afternoon before dark. I have reached the
+end, but now it is hard to stop, hard to let go."
+
+His tone gave first place, primary consideration, to his work. The
+silence in the room suddenly became charged. When the voice was heard
+again, there was constraint in it:
+
+"There is something to be done this afternoon before dark, something I
+have a share in. Having a share, I am interested. Being interested, I
+am prompt. Being prompt, I am here."
+
+He waved his hand over the written sheets before him--those cold Alps
+of learning; and asked reproachfully:
+
+"Are you not interested in all this, O you of little faith?"
+
+"How can I say, O me of little knowledge!"
+
+As the words impulsively escaped, he heard a quick movement behind
+him. He widened out his heavy arms upon his manuscript and looked back
+over his shoulder at her and laughed. And still smiling and holding
+his pen between his fingers, he turned and faced her. She had advanced
+into the middle of the room and had stopped at the chair on which he
+had thrown his overcoat and hat. She had picked up the hat and stood
+turning it and pushing its soft material back into shape for his
+head--without looking at him.
+
+The northern light of the winter afternoon, entering through the
+looped crimson-damask curtains, fell sidewise upon the woman of the
+picture.
+
+Years had passed since the picture had been made. There were changes
+in her; she looked younger. She had effaced the ravages of a sadder
+period of her life as human voyagers upon reaching quiet port repair
+the damages of wandering and storm. Even the look of motherhood, of
+the two motherhoods, which so characterized her in the photograph, had
+disappeared for the present.  Seeing her now for the first time, one
+would have said that her whole mood and bearing made a single
+declaration: she was neither wife nor mother; she was a woman in love
+with life's youth--with youth--youth; in love with the things that
+youth alone could ever secure to her.
+
+The carriage of her beautiful head, brave and buoyant, brought before
+you a vision of growing things in nature as they move towards their
+summer yet far away. There still was youth in the round white throat
+above the collar of green velvet--woodland green--darker than the
+green of the cloth she wore. You were glad she had chosen that color
+because she was going for a walk with him; and green would enchain the
+eye out on the sere ground and under the stripped trees. The
+flecklessness of her long gloves drew your thoughts to winter
+rather--to its one beauteous gift dropped from soiled clouds. A
+slender toque brought out the keenness in the oval of her face.  From
+it rose one backward-sweeping feather of green shaded to coral at the
+tip; and there your fancy may have cared to see lingering the last
+radiance of whiter-sunset skies.
+
+He kept his seat with his back to the manuscript from which he had
+repulsed her; and his eyes swept loyally over her as she
+waited. Though she could scarcely trust herself to speak, still less
+could she endure the silence. With her face turned toward the windows
+opening on the lawn, she stretched out her arm toward him and softly
+shook his hat at him.
+
+"The sun sets--you remember how many minutes after four," she said,
+with no other tone than that of quiet warning. "I marked the minutes
+in the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone to
+bed, so that you would not forget. You know how short the twilights
+are even when the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will not
+be any twilight. The children said they would not be at home until
+after dark, but they may come sooner; it may be a trick. They have
+threatened to catch us this year in one way or another, and you know
+they must not do that--not this year! There must be one more Christmas
+with all its old ways--even if it must be without its old mysteries."
+
+He did not reply at once and then not relevantly:
+
+"I heard you playing."
+
+He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under his
+brows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for she
+held her face averted.
+
+The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater
+constraint in her voice when it was next heard:
+
+"I had to play; you need not have listened."
+
+"I had to listen; you played loud--"
+
+"I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown
+other sounds," she admitted.
+
+"What other sounds?" His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it
+was a frank thrust into the unknown.
+
+"Discords--possibly."
+
+"What discords?" His thrust became deeper.
+
+She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across
+her lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish.
+
+But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hidden
+trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished,
+radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a
+blaze of sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the
+advancing Figure of Joy.
+
+It was the whole familiar picture of him now--triumphantly painted in
+the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords--that
+drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the
+self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near
+losing; and her words issued from behind the closed gates--as through
+a crevice of the closed gates:
+
+"I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep
+grave ones you sent for.  It is written by a deep grave German, and it
+is worked out in the deep grave German way.  The whole purpose of it
+is to show that any woman in the life of any man is merely--an
+Incident.  She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a
+briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, at
+bottom, she is to him--an Incident."
+
+He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened.
+
+"Were those the discords?" he asked gently.
+
+She did not reply.
+
+He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised
+his arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of
+magazines on top of his desk.
+
+"Here is a work," he said, "not written by a German or by any other
+man, but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole
+purpose of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the
+life of any woman.  He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for
+a briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end,
+beneath everything else, he is to her--an Incident."
+
+He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his
+eyes.
+
+"That did not trouble me," he said tenderly.  "Those were not discords
+to me."
+
+Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no
+comment.
+
+His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to
+whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he
+turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself
+from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness:
+
+"Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a year
+now I have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and at
+this work--without any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurred
+before in our lives. You have shared everything. I have relied upon
+you and I have needed you, and you have never failed me. And this
+apparently has been your reward--to be rudely shut out at last.  Now
+you come in and I tell you that the work is done--quite
+finished--without a word to you about it. Do I not understand?" he
+repeated.  "Have I not understood all along? It is true; outwardly as
+regards this work you have been--the Incident."
+
+As he paused, she made a slight gesture with one hand as though she
+did not care for what he was saying and brushed away the fragile web
+of his words from before her eyes--eyes fixed on larger things lying
+clear before her in life's distance.
+
+He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:
+
+"But, comrade of all these years, battler with me for life's
+victories, did you think you were never to know? Did you believe I was
+never to explain? You had only one more day to wait!  If patience, if
+faith, could only have lasted another twenty-four hours--until
+Christmas Eve!"
+
+It was the first time for nearly a year that the sound of those words
+had been heard in that house.  He bent earnestly over toward her; he
+leaned heavily forward with his hands on his knees and searched her
+features with loyal chiding.
+
+"Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?" he asked, "its secrets for you
+and me? Think of Christmas Eve for you and me! Remember!"
+
+Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a
+woodchopper's smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about
+the hidden life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmosphere
+near by is clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender
+haze of old pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred.
+
+He noted the effect of his words and did not wait. He turned to his
+desk and, gathering up the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to
+cover her picture with them.
+
+"Stay blinded and bewildered there," he said, "until the hour comes
+when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand;
+you will then see whether in this work you have been--the Incident."
+
+Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter
+afternoon had perceptibly waned in the room.
+
+She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were
+tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up
+between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.
+
+"It is getting late," she said in nearly the same tone of quiet
+warning with which she had spoken before. "There is no time to lose."
+
+He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its
+interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of
+her arms, looking at her reverently.
+
+But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides--the
+hands that were life, the arms that were love.
+
+She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward
+over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache.
+Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly
+on his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put
+out one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile
+over her shoulder to him:
+
+"Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?" she asked,
+with a struggling sweetness in her voice.
+
+He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve
+with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the
+collar:
+
+"I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books."
+
+"The trouble is," she replied, "the trouble is that the authors are
+right and the books are right: men and women _are_ only Incidents
+to each other in life," and she passed out into the hall.
+
+"Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the
+universe," he replied, "if we cared to look at it in that way; but
+we'd better not!"
+
+He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly
+stopped buttoning his overcoat.  His eyes began to wander over the
+books, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey
+everything that he had brought together from such distances of place
+and time. His work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of
+loneliness, came over him as it comes upon all of us who reach the
+happy ending of toil that we have put our heart and strength in.
+
+"Are you coming?" she called faintly from the hall.
+
+"I am coming," he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he
+stopped again and looked back.
+
+Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was
+on the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers
+who join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment
+that through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which
+men--like a crew of sailors--tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow
+her into some divine haven.
+
+His task was ended. Would it be of service?  Would it carry any
+message? Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth,
+with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable
+children of the future the better for its shining?
+
+"Are you coming?" she called more quiveringly.
+
+"I am coming," he called back, breaking away from his revery, and
+raising his voice so it would surely reach her.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+
+
+She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the
+short frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting
+to be joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed
+on the doorway for his emerging figure.
+
+"To-morrow night," he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his
+words, "to-morrow night you will understand."
+
+"Yes," she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers,
+"to-morrow night I must understand.  Until to-morrow night, then,
+blinded and bewildered with holly and cedar let me be!  Kind
+ignorance, enfold me and spare me! All happiness that I can control or
+conjecture, come to me and console me!"
+
+And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he
+should step forth.
+
+It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what
+they had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind,
+and the whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no
+movement. Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the
+winter land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
+
+The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and
+beyond the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the
+distance you distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-grass
+pastures: white ash and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut
+and black walnut; and the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the
+sycamore with her soft leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the
+hickory brought to mind autumn days when children were abroad,
+ploughing the myriad leaves with booted feet and gathering their
+harvest of nuts--primitive food-storing instinct of the human animal
+still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts to be put away in garret
+and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas came.
+
+Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of
+an axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it
+would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of
+the forest mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be
+gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house.  Near by was a thicket
+of bramble and cane where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly
+thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.
+
+Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield.  The corn had just
+been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears
+ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly
+to remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a
+genial torrent through all days and nights of the year--many a
+full-throated rill--but never with so inundating a movement as at this
+season.  And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all
+farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on
+posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black
+rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor
+over well-chosen chips.
+
+Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled,
+rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.
+
+On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble
+of which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness
+for the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the
+drills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn
+aftermath.
+
+Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where
+hemp-breakers were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks
+wagons loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to
+the towns, helping to fill the farmer's pockets with holiday largess.
+
+Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the
+mistletoe--the holly--the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty
+men--the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives--the turkey
+and the quail--and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sight
+there--the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into
+offerings to the dark solstice, the low activities of the soil
+uplifted to human joyance.
+
+One last thing completed the picture of the scene.
+
+The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day
+and lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive
+verdure.  Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor
+larch nor fir is native to these portions of the Shield; only the wild
+cedar, the shapeless and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage
+of evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had
+been planted.
+
+It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their note
+of deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape
+this dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky they
+waited in beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and spruce
+which seems always to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; the
+dim blue-gray of pines which rather belongs to far-vaulted summer
+skies; and the dark green of firs--true comfortable winter coat when
+snows sift mournfully and icicles are spearing earthward.
+
+These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished the
+picture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied
+no appetite, they were ministers to no passions; but with them the
+Christmas of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape their
+boughs with its gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires the
+spiritual hope of humanity would take its flight toward the eternal.
+
+Thus then the winter land waited for the oncoming of that strange
+travelling festival of the world which has roved into it and encamped
+gypsy-like from old lost countries: the festival that takes toll of
+field and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup and loaf; but that, best of
+all, wrings from the nature of man its reluctant tenderness for his
+fellows and builds out of his lonely doubts regarding this life his
+faith in a better one.
+
+And central on this whole silent scene--the highest element in it--its
+one winter-red passion flower--the motionless woman waiting outside
+the house.
+
+At last he came out upon the step.
+
+He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though his first thought were
+of what the weather was going to be. Then as he buttoned the top
+button of his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down over it to
+make it more comfortable under his short neck, with his other hand he
+gave a little pull at his hat--the romantic country hat; and he peeped
+out from under the rustic brim at her, smiling with old gayeties and
+old fondnesses. He bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked so
+short under the flat headgear that her first thought was how slight a
+disguise every year turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and she
+smiled back at him with the same gayeties and fondnesses of days gone
+by. But such a deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and walked
+hurriedly down the hill toward the evergreens.
+
+He was quickly at her side. She could feel how animal youth in him
+released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was
+brutal vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as
+his overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping
+out of life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down
+the lawn he halted and laid his hand heavily on her wrist.
+
+"Listen to that!" he said. His voice was eager, excited, like a boy's.
+
+On the opposite side of the house, several hundred yards away, the
+country turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them the
+rumbling of many vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of the
+nearest town and moving toward smaller villages scattered over the
+country; to its hamlets and cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer
+or poorer--every vehicle Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of the
+Southern Yule-tide. There were matters and usages in those American
+carriages and buggies and wagons and carts the history of which went
+back to the England of the Georges and the Stuarts and the Henrys; to
+the England of Elizabeth, to the England of Chaucer; back through
+robuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred, and on beyond
+this till they were lost under the forest glooms of Druidical Britain.
+
+They stood looking into each other's eyes and gathering into their
+ears the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it all
+meant--this far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they saw
+the whole picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: the
+atmosphere of it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouring
+from its chimneys, so that twilight in it had already begun to fall
+ahead of twilight out in the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along
+the little streets, and shops to be illuminated to the delight of
+window-gazing, mystery-loving children--wild with their holiday
+excitements and secrecies.  Somewhere in the throng their own two
+children were busy unless they had already started home.
+
+For years he had held a professorship in the college in this town,
+driving in and out from his home; but with the close of this academic
+year he was to join the slender file of Southern men who have been
+called to Northern universities: this change would mean the end of
+life here. Both thought of this now--of the last Christmas in the
+house; and with the same impulse they turned their gaze back to it.
+
+More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield, a
+writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its
+meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of
+an entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue,
+he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into
+the notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world
+knows it--the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of
+American home life--embodying the very soul of it in the clear amber
+of sound.
+
+This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low,
+old-fashioned, brown-walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneys
+generous, with green window-shutters less than green and white
+window-sills less than white; with feudal vines giving to its walls
+their summery allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in the
+middle years of its strength and its honors; not needy, not wealthy,
+but answering Agar's prayer for neither poverty nor riches.
+
+The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it.
+
+It had been the house of his fathers. He had brought her to it as his
+own on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across the
+country. They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him in
+the carriage, one of his arms around her and his other hand enfolding
+both of hers, she had first caught sight of it through the forest
+trees--waiting for her with its lights just lit, its warmth, its
+privacies: and that had been Christmas Eve!
+
+For her wedding day had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her
+choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she
+had clung to it the more positively.
+
+"It is the most beautiful night of the year!"  she had replied,
+brushing their objection aside with that reason alone. "And it is the
+happiest!  I will be married on that night, when I am happiest!"
+
+Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered other words to
+herself--yet scarce uttered them, rather felt them:
+
+"Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannot
+fail us became human.  My love for him, which is the divine thing in
+my life and which is never to fail him, shall become human to him on
+that night."
+
+When the carriage had stopped at the front porch, he had led her into
+the house between the proud smiling servants of his establishment
+ranged at a respectful distance on each side; and without surrendering
+her even to her maid--a new spirit of silence on him--he had led her
+to her bedroom, to a place on the carpet under the chandelier.
+
+Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in
+her youth and loveliness--_for him;_ come into his house, into
+his arms--_his_; no other's--never while life lasted to be
+another's even in thought or in desire.
+
+Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of
+many had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could
+gather her home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms
+and set upon her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As
+his warm breath broke close against her face, his lips under their
+mustache, almost boyish then, had thoughtlessly formed one little
+phrase--one little but most lasting and fateful phrase:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe_!"
+
+Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of
+mistletoe swung from the chandelier.
+
+Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards
+know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as
+the first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them
+most clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow
+down into the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon
+the life-sap of the tree. And in all the later years they had been the
+green spot of verdure under life's dark skies--the undying bough into
+which the spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"
+
+Through the first problem of learning to weld her nature to his
+wisely; through the perils of bearing children and the agony of seeing
+some of them pass away; through the ambition of having him rise in his
+profession and through the ideal of making his home an earthly
+paradise; through loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he came
+back,--upon her whole life had rested the wintry benediction of that
+mystical phrase:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She turned away now, starting once more downward toward the
+evergreens. He was quickly at her side.
+
+"What do you suppose Harold and Elizabeth are up to about this time?"
+he asked, with a good-humored jerk of his head toward the distant
+town.
+
+"At least to something mischievous, whatever it is," she
+replied. "They begged to be allowed to stay until the shop windows
+were lighted; they have seen the shop windows two or three times
+already this week: there is no great marvel for them now in shop
+windows. Permission to stay late may be a blind to come home
+early. They are determined, from what I have overheard, to put an end
+this year to the parental house mysteries of Christmas. They are
+crossing the boundary between the first childhood and the second. But
+if it be possible, I wish everything to be kept once more just as it
+has always been; let it be so for my sake!"
+
+"And I wish it for your sake," he replied heartily; "and for my
+purposes."
+
+After a moment of silence he asked: "How large a Tree must it be this
+year?"
+
+"It will have to be large," she replied; and she began to count those
+for whom the Tree this year was meant.
+
+First she called the names of the two children they had lost. Gifts
+for these were every year hung on the boughs. She mentioned their
+names now, and then she continued counting:
+
+"Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the family
+come Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor's children.  Then
+the servants--long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow for
+the other children who are to make up the Christmas party: ten
+children have been invited, ten children have accepted, ten children
+will arrive. The ten will bring with them some unimportant parents;
+you can judge."
+
+"That will do for size," he said, laughing.  "Now the kind:
+spruce--larch--hemlock--pine--which shall it be?"
+
+"It shall be none of them!" she answered, after a little waiting. "It
+shall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeer
+are harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts--fir.  The old
+Christmas stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in it
+longest. And deepest mystery darkens the heart of it," she added.
+
+"Fir it shall be!" he said. "Choose the tree."
+
+"I have chosen."
+
+She stopped and delicately touched his wrist with the finger tips of
+one white-gloved hand, bidding him stand beside her.
+
+"That one," she said, pointing down.
+
+The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens in summer gratefully,
+but now lying like a band of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near
+the middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on this
+island, aloof from its fellows and with space for the growth of its
+boughs, stood a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering
+faultlessly, star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered more
+years--a tame dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurred
+with wildness and lapped by low washings of the planet's primeval
+ocean.
+
+At each Christmas for several years they had been tempted to cut this
+tree, but had spared it for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the
+thicket.
+
+"That one," she now said, pointing down.  "This is the last time. Let
+us have the best of things while we may! Is it not always the perfect
+that is demanded for sacrifice?"
+
+His glance had already gone forward eagerly to the tree, and he
+started toward it.
+
+Descending, they stepped across the brook to the island and went up
+close to the fir. With a movement not unobserved by her he held out
+his hand and clasped three green fingers of a low bough which the fir
+seemed to stretch out to him recognizingly. (She had always realized
+the existence of some intimate bond between him and the forest.) His
+face now filled with meanings she did not share; the spell of the
+secret work had followed him out of the house down to the trees;
+incommunicable silence shut him in.  A moment later his fingers parted
+with the green fingers of the fir and he moved away from her side,
+starting around the tree and studying it as though in delight of fresh
+knowledge. So she watched him pass around to the other side.
+
+When he came back where he had started, she was not there. He looked
+around searchingly; her figure was nowhere in sight.
+
+He stood--waiting.
+
+The valley had memories, what memories!  The years came close together
+here; they clustered as thickly as the trees themselves. Vacant spots
+among them marked where the Christmas Trees of former years had been
+cut down. Some of the Trees had been for the two children they had
+lost. This wandering trail led hither and thither back to the first
+Tree for the first child: he had stooped down and cut that close to
+the ground with his mere penknife. When it had been lighted, it had
+held only two or three candles; and the candle on the top of it had
+flared level into the infant's hand-shaded eyes.
+
+He knew that she was making through the evergreens a Pilgrimage of the
+Years, walking there softly and alone with the feet of life's Pities
+and a mother's Constancies.
+
+He waited for her--motionless.
+
+The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley now. Only from the
+trees came the plaintive twittering of birds which had come in from
+frozen weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds of the boughs were
+calling to one another. It was not their song, but their speech; there
+was no love in it, but there was what for them perhaps corresponds to
+our sense of ties. It most resembled in human life the brief things
+that two people, having long lived together, utter to each other when
+together in a room they prepare for the night: there is no
+anticipation; it is a confession of the unconfessed.  About him now
+sounded this low winter music from the far boundary of other lives.
+
+He did not hear it.
+
+The light on the landscape had changed. The sun was setting and a
+splendor began to spread along the sky and across the land. It laid a
+glory on the roof of the house on the hill; it smote the edge of the
+woodland pasture, burnishing with copper the gray domes; it shone
+faintly on distant corn shocks, on the weather-dark tents of the hemp
+at bivouac soldierly and grim. At his feet it sparkled in rose gleams
+on the samite of the brook and threw burning shafts into the gloom of
+the fir beside him.
+
+He did not see it.
+
+He did not hear the calling of the birds about his ears, he did not
+see the sunset before his eyes, he did not feel the fir tree the
+boughs of which stuck against his side.
+
+He stood there as still as a rock--with his secret. Not the secret of
+the year's work, which was to be divulged to his wife and through her
+to the world; but the secret which for some years had been growing in
+his life and which would, he hoped, never grow into the open--to be
+seen of her and of all men.
+
+The sentimental country hat now looked as though it might have been
+worn purposely to help out a disguise, as the more troubled man behind
+the scenes makes up to be the happier clown. It became an absurdity, a
+mockery, above his face grave, stern, set of jaw and eye. He was no
+longer the student buried among his books nor human brother to toiling
+brothers. He had not the slightest thought of service to mankind left
+in him, he was but a man himself with enough to think of in the battle
+between his own will and blood.
+
+And behind him among the dark evergreens went on that Pilgrimage of
+the Years--with the feet of the Pities and the Constancies.
+
+Moments passed; he did not stir. Then there was a slight noise on the
+other side of the tree, and his nature instantly stepped back into his
+outward place. He looked through the boughs. She had returned and was
+standing with her face also turned toward the sunset; it was very
+pale, very still.
+
+Such darkness had settled on the valley now that the green she wore
+blent with the green of the fir. He saw only her white face and her
+white hands so close to the branches that they appeared to rest upon
+them, to grow out of them: he sadly thought of one of his prints of
+Egypt of old and of the Lady of the Sacred Tree. Her long
+backward-sweeping plume of green also blent with the green of the
+fir--shade to shade--and only the coral tip of it remained strongly
+visible. This matched the last coral in the sunset; and it seemed to
+rest ominously above her head as a finger-point of the fading light of
+Nature.
+
+He went quickly around to her. He locked his arms around her and drew
+her close and held her close; and thus for a while the two stood,
+watching the flame on the altar of the world as it sank lower, leaving
+emptiness and ashes.
+
+Once she put out a hand and with a gesture full of majesty and
+nobleness waved farewell to the dying fire.
+
+Still without a word he took his arms from around her and turned
+energetically to the tree.
+
+He pressed the lowest boughs aside and made his way in close to the
+trunk and struck it with a keen stroke.
+
+The fir as he drew the axe out made at its gashed throat a sound like
+that of a butchered, blood-strangled creature trying to cry out too
+late against a treachery. A horror ran through the boughs; the
+thousands of leaves were jarred by the death-strokes; and the top of
+it rocked like a splendid plume too rudely treated in a storm. Then it
+fell over on its side, bridging blackly the white ice of the brook.
+
+Stooping, he lifted it triumphantly. He set the butt-end on one of his
+shoulders and, stretching his arms up, grasped the trunk and held the
+tree straight in the air, so that it seemed to be growing out of his
+big shoulder as out of a ledge of rock.  Then he turned to her and
+laughed out in his strength and youth. She laughed joyously back at
+him, glorying as he did.
+
+With a robust re-shouldering of the tree to make it more comfortable
+to carry, he turned and started up the hill toward the house. As she
+followed behind, the old mystery of the woods seemed at last to have
+taken bodily possession of him. The fir was riding on his shoulder,
+its arms met fondly around his neck, its fingers were caressing his
+hair. And it whispered back jeeringly to her through the twilight:
+
+"Say farewell to him! He was once yours; he is yours no longer. He
+dandles the child of the forest on his shoulder instead of his
+children by you in the house. He belongs to Nature; and as Nature
+calls, he will always follow--though it should lead over the precipice
+or into the flood.  Once Nature called him to you: remember how he
+broke down barriers until he won you. Now he is yours no longer--say
+good-by to him!"
+
+With an imbued terror and desolation, she caught up with him. By a
+movement so soft that he should not be aware, she plucked him by the
+coat sleeve on the other side from the fir and held on to him as he
+strode on in careless joy.
+
+Halfway up the hill lights began to flash from the windows of the
+house: a servant was bringing in the lamps. It was at this hour, in
+just this way, that she had first caught sight of them on that
+Christmas Eve when he had brought her home after the wedding.
+
+She hurried around in front of him, wishing to read the expression of
+his eyes by the distant gleams from the windows. Would they have
+nothing to say to her about those winter twilight lamps? Did he, too,
+not remember?
+
+His head and face were hidden; a thousand small spears of Nature
+bristled between him and her; but he laughed out to her from behind
+the rampart of the green spears.
+
+At that moment a low sound in the distance drew her attention, and
+instantly alert she paused to listen. Then, forgetting everything
+else, she called to him with a rush of laughter like that of her
+mischief-loving girlhood:
+
+"Quick! There they are! I heard the gate shut at the turnpike! They
+must not catch us!  Quick! Quick!"
+
+"Hurry, then!" he cried, as he ran forward, joining his laughter to
+hers. "Open the door for me!"
+
+After this the night fell fast. The only sounds to be heard in the
+valley were the minute readjustments of the ice of the brook as it
+froze tighter and the distressed cries of the birds that had roosted
+in the fir.
+
+So the Tree entered the house.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+
+
+During the night it turned bitter cold.  When morning came the sky was
+a turquoise and the wind a gale.  The sun seemed to give out light but
+not heat--to lavish its splendor but withhold its charity. Moist flesh
+if it chanced to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter land
+the tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece of greased metal used as
+a trap and is caught and held there until the trapper returns or until
+it starves--starves with food on its tongue.
+
+The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farmhand struck it, resisted
+as rock. In the fetlocks of farm horses, as they moved shivering,
+balls of ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little roughnesses of
+woodland paths snapped off beneath the slow-searching hoofs of
+fodder-seeking cattle like points of glass.
+
+Within their wool the sheep were comforted.
+
+On higher fields which had given back their moisture to the atmosphere
+and now were dry, the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals and
+dragged it away in flaunting yellow veils. The picture it made, being
+so ill-seasoned, led you to think of August drought when the
+grasshopper stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is hot
+in the nostrils and every bird holds its beak open and its wings
+lifted like cooling lattices alongside its breast. In these veils of
+dust swarms of frost crystals sported--dead midgets of the dead
+North. Except crystal and dust and wind, naught moved out there; no
+field mouse, no hare nor lark nor little shielded dove. In the naked
+trees of the pasture the crow kept his beak as unseen as the owl's;
+about the cedars of the yard no scarlet feather warmed the day.
+
+The house on the hill--one of the houses whose spirit had been blown
+into the amber of the poet's song--sent festal smoke out of its
+chimneys all day long. At intervals the radiant faces of children
+appeared at the windows, hanging wreaths of evergreens; or their
+figures flitted to and fro within as they wove garlands on the walls
+for the Christmas party. At intervals some servant with head and
+shoulders muffled in a bright-colored shawl darted trippingly from the
+house to the cabins in the yard and from the cabins back to the
+house--the tropical African's polar dance between fire and fire. By
+every sign it gave the house showed that it was marshalling its whole
+happiness.
+
+One thing only seemed to make a signal of distress from afar. The oak
+tree beside the house, whose roots coiled warmly under the
+hearth-stones and whose boughs were outstretched across the roof,
+seemed to writhe and rock in its winter sleep with murmurings and
+tossings like a human dreamer trying to get rid of an unhappy dream.
+Imagination might have said that some darkest tragedy of forests long
+since gone still lived in this lone survivor--that it struggled to
+give up the grief and guilt of an ancient forest shame.
+
+The weather moderated in the afternoon. A warm current swept across
+the upper atmosphere, developing everywhere behind it a cloud; and
+toward sundown out of this cloud down upon the Shield snow began to
+fall. Not the large wet flakes which sometimes descend too late in
+spring upon the buds of apple orchards; nor those mournfuller ones
+which drop too soon on dim wild violets in November woods, but winter
+snow, stern sculptor of Arctic solitudes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all over the Shield.
+
+Softly the snow fell upon the year's footprints and pathways of
+children and upon schoolhouses now closed and riotously deserted. More
+softly upon too crowded asylums for them: houses of noonday darkness
+where eyes eagerly look out at the windows but do not see; houses of
+soundlessness where ears listen and do not hear any noise; houses of
+silence where lips try to speak but utter no word.
+
+The snow of Christmas Eve was falling softly on the old: whose eyes
+are always seeing vanished faces, whose ears hear voices gentler than
+any the earth now knows, whose hands forever try to reach other hands
+vainly held out to them.  Sad, sad to those who remember loved ones
+gone with their kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve!
+
+But sadder yet for those who live on together after kindnesses have
+ceased, or whose love went like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve to
+them! Dark its snow and blinding!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was late that night.
+
+She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a shaded lamp--the only
+light in the room. Her face, always calm in life's wisdom, but
+agitated now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in toward her,
+rested clear-cut upon the darkness.
+
+She placed the lamp on a table near the door and seated herself beside
+it. But she pushed the lamp away unconsciously as though the light of
+the house were no longer her light; and she sat in the chair as though
+it were no longer her chair; and she looked about the room as though
+it were no longer hers nor the house itself nor anything else that she
+cared for most.
+
+Earlier in the evening they had finished hanging the presents on the
+Tree; but then an interruption had followed: the children had broken
+profanely in upon them, rending the veil of the house mysteries; and
+for more than an hour the night had been given up to them. Now the
+children were asleep upstairs, already dreaming of Christmas Morn and
+the rush for the stockings. The servants had finished their work and
+were gone to their quarters out in the yard. The doors of the house
+were locked. There would be no more intrusion now, no possible
+interruption; all the years were to meet him and her--alone. For Life
+is the master dramatist: when its hidden tragedies are ready to utter
+themselves, everything superfluous quits the stage; it is the
+essential two who fill it! And how little the rest of the world ever
+hears of what takes place between the two!
+
+A little while before he had left the room with the step-ladder; when
+he came back, he was to bring with him the manuscript--the silent
+snowfall of knowledge which had been deepening about him for a
+year. The time had already passed for him to return, but he did not
+come. Was there anything in the forecast of the night that made him
+falter? Was he shrinking--_him_ shrink? She put away the thought
+as a strange outbreak of injustice.
+
+How still it was outside the house with the snow falling! How still
+within! She began to hear the ticking of the tranquil old clock under
+the stairway out in the hall--always tranquil, always tranquil. And
+then she began to listen to the disordered strokes of her own
+heart--that red Clock in the body's Tower whose beats are sent outward
+along the streets and alleys of the blood; whose law it is to be
+alternately wound too fast by the fingers of Joy, too slow by the
+fingers of Sorrow; and whose fate, if it once run down, never
+afterwards either by Joy or Sorrow to be made to run again.
+
+At last she could hear the distant door of his study open and close
+and his steps advance along the hall. With what a splendid swing and
+tramp he brought himself toward her!--with what self-unconsciousness
+and virile strength in his feet!  His steps entered and crossed his
+bedroom, entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he stood there
+before her in the parlor doorway, a few yards off--stopped and
+regarded her intently, smiling.
+
+In a moment she realized what had delayed him. When he had gone away
+with the step-ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behind
+locked doors, he had been working all the afternoon at the decorations
+of the Tree. Now he came back ceremoniously dressed; the rest of the
+night was to be in her honor.
+
+It had always been so on this anniversary of their bridal night. They
+had always dressed for it; the children now in their graves had been
+dressed for it; the children in bed upstairs were regularly dressed
+for it; the house was dressed for it; the servants were dressed for
+it; the whole life of that establishment had always been made to feel
+by honors and tendernesses and gayeties that this was the night on
+which he had married her and brought her home.
+
+As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as never before how these
+anniversaries had not taken his youth away, but had added youth to
+him; he had grown like the evergreen in the middle of the room--with
+increase of trunk and limbs and with larger tides of strength surging
+through him toward the master sun. There were no ravages of married
+life in him. Time had merely made the tree more of a tree and made his
+youth more youth.
+
+She took in momentary details of his appearance: a moisture like
+summer heat along the edge of his yellow hair, started by the bath
+into which he had plunged; the freshness of the enormous hands holding
+the manuscript; the muscle of the forearm bulging within the
+dress-coat sleeve.  Many a time she had wondered how so perfect an
+animal as he had ever climbed to such an elevation of work; and then
+had wondered again whether any but such an animal ever in life does so
+climb--shouldering along with him the poise and breadth of health and
+causing the hot sun of the valley to shine on the mountain tops.
+
+Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed in her honor, thus
+but the larger youth after all their years together, would return her
+greeting with a light in his eyes that had always made them so
+beautiful to her--a light burning as at a portal opening inward for
+her only.
+
+His eyes rested on his manuscript.
+
+He brought it wrapped and tied in the true holiday spirit--sprigs of
+cedar and holly caught in the ribands; and he now lifted and held it
+out to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems.  Then he
+stepped forward and put it on the table at her elbow.
+
+"For you!" he said reverently, stepping back.
+
+There had been years when, returning from a tramp across the country,
+he would bring her perhaps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or a
+brilliant autumn leaf for her throat.
+
+"For you!" he would say; and then, before he could give it to her, he
+would throw it away and take her in his arms. Afterwards she would
+pick up the trifle and treasure it.
+
+"For you!" he now said, offering her the treasure of his year's toil
+and stepping back.
+
+So the weight of the gift fell on her heart like a stone. She did not
+look at it or touch it but glanced up at him. He raised his finger,
+signalling for silence; and going to the chimney corner, brought back
+a long taper and held it over the lamp until it ignited. Then with a
+look which invited her to follow, he walked to the Tree and began to
+light the candles.
+
+He began at the lowest boughs and, passing around, touched them one by
+one. Around and around he went, and higher and higher twinkled the
+lights as they mounted the tapering sides of the fir. At the top he
+kindled one highest red star, shining down on everything below. Then
+he blew out the taper, turned out the lamp; and returning to the tree,
+set the heavy end of the taper on the floor and grasped it midway, as
+one might lightly hold a stout staff.
+
+The room, lighted now by the common glow of the candles, revealed
+itself to be the parlor of the house elaborately decorated for the
+winter festival.  Holly wreaths hung in the windows; the walls were
+garlanded; evergreen boughs were massed above the window cornices; on
+the white lace of window curtains many-colored autumn leaves, pressed
+and kept for this night, looked as though they had been blown there
+scatteringly by October winds. The air of the room was heavy with
+odors; there was summer warmth in it.
+
+In the middle of the room stood the fir tree itself, with its top
+close to the ceiling and its boughs stretched toward the four walls of
+the room impartially--as symbolically to the four corners of the
+earth. It would be the only witness of all that was to take place
+between them: what better could there be than this messenger of
+silence and wild secrecy? From the mountains and valleys of the planet
+its race had looked out upon a million generations of men and women;
+and the calmness of its lot stretched across the turbulence of human
+passion as an ancient bridge spans a modern river.
+
+At the apex of the Tree a star shone. Just beneath at the first
+forking of the boughs a candle burned. A little lower down a cross
+gleamed.  Under the cross a white dove hung poised, its pinions
+outstretched as though descending out of the infinite upon some
+earthly object below.  From many of the branches tiny bells swung.
+There were little horns and little trumpets.  Other boughs sagged
+under the weight of silvery cornucopias. Native and tropical fruits
+were tied on here and there; and dolls were tied on also with cords
+around their necks, their feet dangling.  There were smiling masks,
+like men beheaded and smiling in their death. Near the base of the
+Tree there was a drum. And all over the Tree from pinnacle to base
+glittered a tinsel like golden fleece--looking as the moss of old
+Southern trees seen at yellow sunset.
+
+He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation of it. This year at his
+own request the decorations had been left wholly to him; now he seemed
+satisfied.
+
+He turned to her eagerly.
+
+"Do you remember what took place on Christmas Eve last year?" he
+asked, with a reminiscent smile. "You sat where you are sitting and I
+stood where I am standing. After I had finished lighting the Tree, do
+you remember what you said?"
+
+After a moment she stirred and passed her fingers across her brows.
+
+"Recall it to me," she answered. "I must have said many things. I did
+not know that I had said anything that would be remembered a year.
+Recall it to me."
+
+"You looked at the Tree and said what a mystery it is. When and where
+did it begin, how and why?--this Tree that is now nourished in the
+affections of the human family round the world."
+
+"Yes; I remember that."
+
+"I resolved to find out for you. I determined to prepare during what
+hours I could spare from my regular college work the gratification of
+your wish for you as a gift from me. If I could myself find the way
+back through the labyrinth of ages, then I would return for you and
+lead you back through the story of the Christmas Tree as that story
+has never been seen by any one else. All this year's work, then, has
+been the threading of the labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again,
+my work is finished, my gift to you is ready."
+
+He made this announcement and stopped, leaving it to clear the air of
+mystery--the mystery of the secret work.
+
+Then he resumed: "Have you, then, been the Incident in this toil as
+yesterday you intimated that you were? Do you now see that you have
+been the whole reason of it? You were excluded from any share in the
+work only because you could not help to prepare your own gift! That is
+all. What has looked like a secret in this house has been no
+secret. You are blinded and bewildered no longer; the hour has come
+when holly and cedar can speak for themselves."
+
+Sunlight broke out all over his face.
+
+She made no reply but said within herself:
+
+"Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has nothing to do with the
+trouble. The secret of the house is not a misunderstanding; it is
+life. It is not the doing of a year; it is the undoing of the
+years. It is not a gift to enrich me with new happiness; it is a
+lesson that leaves me poorer."
+
+He went on without pausing:
+
+"It is already late. The children interrupted us and took up part of
+your evening. But it is not too late for me to present to you some
+little part of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a short story
+out of the long one. The whole long story is there," he added,
+directing his eyes toward the manuscript at her elbow; and his voice
+showed how he felt a scholar's pride in it.  "From you it can pass out
+to the world that celebrates Christmas and that often perhaps asks the
+same question: What is the history of the Christmas Tree? But now my
+story for you!"
+
+"Wait a moment," she said, rising. She left the package where it was;
+and with feet that trembled against the soft carpet crossed the room
+and seated herself at one end of a deep sofa.
+
+Gathering her dignity about her, she took there the posture of a
+listener--listening at her ease.
+
+The sofa was of richly carved mahogany.  Each end curved into a scroll
+like a landward wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms rested on
+one of the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small table
+on which stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it
+profuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They were one of her
+favorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her this
+afternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen
+messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down the
+wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back
+were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of the sofa her piano
+stood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to him, or played
+with thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music also which
+she many a time read; as Beethoven's Great Nine.
+
+Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to window
+curtain there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put there
+by the children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoon
+they had fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree
+felled the day before--they knowing nothing, happy children!
+
+There she reclined.
+
+The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness over
+which points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in some
+too warm a night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and the
+blackness of her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare arms
+and shoulders and faultless neck and faultless throat bared also. Not
+far away was hid the warm foam-white thigh, curved like Venus's of old
+out of the sea's inaccessible purity. About her wrists garlands of old
+family corals were clasped--the ocean's roses; and on her breast,
+between the night of her gown and the dawn of the flesh, coral buds
+flowered in beauty that could never be opened, never be rifled.
+
+When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two aged
+house-dogs--setters with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle
+breeding--had followed her and lain down at her feet; and one with a
+thrust of his nose pushed her skirts back from the toe of her slipper
+and rested his chin on it.
+
+"I will listen," she said, shrinking as yet from other speech. "I wish
+simply to listen. There will be time enough afterwards for what I have
+to say."
+
+"Then I shall go straight through," he replied.  "One minute now while
+I put together the story for you: it is hard to make a good short
+story out of so vast a one."
+
+During these moments of waiting she saw a new picture of him. Under
+stress of suffering and excitement discoveries denied to calmer hours
+often arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a shock that
+causes it to yawn and open its abysses: at the bottom we see new
+things: sometimes creating new happiness; sometimes old happiness is
+taken away.
+
+As he stood there--the man beside the Tree--into the picture entered
+three other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on the
+walls.
+
+One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale the
+mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the
+reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central
+portions where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the
+rocks: Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing
+and fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and
+children. With his passion for the wilderness--its game, enemies,
+campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely,
+stern, gaunt face, no modern expression in it whatsoever--the timeless
+face of the woods.
+
+Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of the
+family. This man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi the
+central counties; and wherever his power had reached, he had used it
+on a great scale for the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer,
+field-maker; working to bring in the period on the Shield when the
+hand of a man began to grasp the plough instead of the rifle, when the
+stallion had replaced the stag, and bellowing cattle wound fatly down
+into the pastures of the bison. This man had the face of his
+caste--the countenance of the Southern slave-holding feudal lord. Not
+the American face, but the Southern face of a definite era--less than
+national, less than modern; a face not looking far in any direction
+but at things close around.
+
+From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with his
+contemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of the
+Shield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie with
+remnants of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near this
+house. This immediate forefather bore the countenance that began to
+develop in the Northerner and in the Southerner after the Civil War:
+not the Northern look nor the Southern look, but the American look--a
+new thing in the American face, indefinable but unmistakable.
+
+These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of
+the line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of
+them in his own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the
+woods as an implement. In his own case, the woods around him having
+disappeared, the ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry.
+
+The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern
+forestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professorship
+his original researches in this field began to attract attention.
+These had to do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation to
+South Appalachian civilization and thus to that of the continent.
+
+This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from his
+own college and country to a Northern university.
+
+Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of an
+ancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into
+that of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into the
+modern American face unlike any other; now finally in him the national
+American look had broadened into something more modern still--the look
+of mere humanity: he did not look like an American--he looked like a
+man in the service of mankind.
+
+This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself to
+her as one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how the
+past had swept him along with its current; and of how the future now
+caught him up and bore him on, part in its problems. The old passion
+living on in him--forest life; a new passion born in him--human
+life. And by inexorable logic these two now blending themselves
+to-night in a story of the Christmas Tree.
+
+But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces something
+intensely personal to which she could cling; and she did it in this
+wise.
+
+In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they would
+go out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; she
+leading him this way and that way and laying upon him beautiful
+exactions and tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not do
+this and not do that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave.
+
+Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her down
+the lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summer
+evening woods; and there on the roots of some old tree--the shadows of
+the forest behind them and the light of the western sky in their
+faces--they would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes from
+each other.
+
+The burning horizon became a cathedral interior--the meeting of love's
+holiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil upon
+the low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses and
+turf of the Shield under them. The warmth of his body was as the day's
+sunlight stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like its
+tawny bloom, native to the sun.
+
+Life with him was enchanted madness.
+
+He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write on
+the air of the room.  Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his
+classroom when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standing
+at the blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of his
+lecture for the students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as he
+finished each word, he read it aloud to her:
+
+"A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK"
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+
+
+"Josephine!"
+
+He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of it
+float over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls of
+the room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication.
+
+Then he began:
+
+"Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a spring
+morning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. I
+have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question the
+blossoms in your questioning way--you who are always wishing to probe
+the heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of their
+significance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragrant
+trumpets could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It was
+where the filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of a
+dead past that you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces of
+their philosophy.
+
+"So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modern
+man to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of
+the vine; the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach of
+life; and the point where it clamors for satisfaction is at the
+greatest possible distance from its birthplace. For all these
+instincts send their roots down through the mould of the uncivilized,
+down through the mould of the primitive, down into the mould of the
+underhuman--that ancient playhouse dedicated to low tragedies.
+
+"While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of the
+story, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are to
+ourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kind
+of father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beings
+we are to our fellow beings--the passions which swell as with sap the
+buds of those relations until they burst into their final shapes of
+conduct are fed from the bottom of the world's mould.  You and I
+to-night are building the structures of our moral characters upon
+life-piles that sink into fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our
+drinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majestically towards the sea
+and catch drops trickling from the springs of creation.
+
+"It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that
+my story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human
+nature as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have
+wrested it from this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house
+on this Night of the Nativity."
+
+He made the scholar's pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy
+narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling
+the story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid
+Alpine snows.
+
+He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of
+the human race is the sea.  It is true that man in some ancestral form
+was rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the
+islanded Greeks said of near Venus.  Traces of this origin he still
+bears both in his body and his emotions; and together they make up his
+first set of memories--Sea Memories.
+
+He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single
+picturesque phrase:
+
+"Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which the
+hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are
+sounding."
+
+Next he told her how man's last marine ancestor quit one day the sea
+never again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach and
+entered the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, soft to
+impressions, the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shape
+it over from sea uses to forest uses.
+
+A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at the
+sea-shell.
+
+It remodelled the shell as so much clay; stood it up and twisted and
+branched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron;
+tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble;
+painted it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it up
+as a life tower--the world's one beacon: steadily sending it onward
+through one trial form after another until at last had been perfected
+for it that angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to
+sob and to smile.
+
+And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and entered
+the forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared
+at the edge of the forest the creature it had made.  On every wall of
+its being internal and external forest-written; and completely
+forest-minded: having nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling,
+forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith; so that in all it could
+do or know or feel or dream or imagine or believe it was
+forest-tethered.
+
+At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelled
+to emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had been
+driven to quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn of
+our history of him.
+
+And if the first set of race memories--Sea Memories--still endure
+within him, how much more powerful are the second set--the Forest
+Memories!
+
+So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished as
+forest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant races
+on the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether and
+will become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerful
+that those highest races which have been longest out in the open--as
+our own Aryan race--have never ceased to be reached by the influence
+of the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning trees
+falling across the mortal clearings toward the sunset.
+
+These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlike
+generations of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuated
+affections which we call in ourselves the Love of Nature; these
+affections are inherited: new feelings for nature we have none. The
+writers of our day who speak of civilized man's love of nature as a
+developing sense err wholly. They are like explorers who should
+mistake a boundary for the interior of a continent. Man's knowledge of
+nature is modern, but it no more endows him with new feeling than
+modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new bone or his latest
+knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an additional artery.
+
+Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are Forest
+Memories.
+
+But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, that
+contains the separate buried root of the story: Man's Forest Faith.
+
+When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it had
+planted in him--there to grow forever--the root of faith that he was a
+forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the
+science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To
+himself forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be
+his immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the
+Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were
+descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race
+is tethered to the world-ash.  Among every people of antiquity this
+forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some
+ancestral tree. In the Orient each succeeding Buddha of Indian
+mythology was tethered to a different tree; each god of the later
+classical Pantheon was similarly tethered: Jupiter to the oak, Apollo
+to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno to the
+apple, on and on. Forest worship was universal--the most impressive
+and bewildering to modern science that the human spirit has ever built
+up. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the Trees.
+
+Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the ages
+toward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew with
+his growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successive
+scythes of time; but always new sprouts were put forth.
+
+Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodily
+presence within the forest; but one final day the forest lost the
+Immortal as its indwelling creator.
+
+Next the old forest worshipper peopled the trees with an intermediate
+race of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long he
+beguiled himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; but
+the lesser could not maintain themselves in temples from which the
+greater had already been expelled, and they too passed out of sight
+down the roadway of the world.
+
+Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and during
+yet later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woods
+became freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals of
+his own race had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations of
+the gods.  Then this last panorama of illusion faded also, and
+civilized man stood face to face with the modern woods--inhabitated
+only by its sap and cells. The trees had drawn their bark close around
+them, wearing an inviolate tapestry across those portals through which
+so many a stranger to them had passed in and passed out; and
+henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest--its one reply to all
+man's questionings--became the Voice of its own Mystery.
+
+After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. But
+we must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of
+human life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own
+Indo-European race dwells as it were on the forest edge. And the
+forest still reaches out and twines itself around our deepest
+spiritual truths: home--birth--love--prayer--death: it tries to
+overrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our houses,
+instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and to
+shelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countries
+whenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature;
+in our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonies
+with garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped
+hi cathedral stone--memory of the grove, God's first temple; and when
+we die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of
+our rest.  Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some
+obscure instinct in us that it is God-forsaken.
+
+Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for his
+spirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf and
+tendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every later
+world-worship; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into the
+ritual of Christianity.
+
+This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence at
+the Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man worshipping the
+tree as the Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we see
+him using that tree in the worship of the creative Father's Son come
+to earth in the Father's stead.
+
+"On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brief
+tapers of the night; but on it rests also the long light of that
+spiritual dawn when man began his Adoration of the Trees.  It is the
+forest taking its place once more beside the long-lost Immortal."
+
+Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should address
+her thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual for
+them. For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the ground
+of his lectures, and she shared his thought before it reached
+others. It was their high and equal comradeship. Wherever his mind
+could go hers went--a brilliant torch, a warming sympathy.
+
+But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on a
+motionless figure of stone.  If he was sensible of this change in her,
+he gave no sign. And after a moment he passed to the remaining part of
+the story.
+
+"Thus far I have been speaking to you of the bare tree in wild nature:
+here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you that
+they too are Forest Memories--that since the evergreen moved over into
+the service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds these
+Forest Memories have followed it and have alighted amid its
+branches. Everything here has its story. I am going to tell you in
+each case what that story is; I am going to interpret everything on
+the Christmas Tree and the other Christmas decorations in the room."
+
+It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him and
+never afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoe
+would have its; he must interpret that: and thus he himself
+unexpectedly had brought about the situation she wished. She would
+meet him at that symbolic bough: there be rendered the Judgment of the
+Years! And now as one sits down at some point of a road where a
+traveller must arrive, she waited for him there.
+
+He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest
+worshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his
+offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in
+offering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man had
+learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive
+custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during
+that immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set
+one stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove--the
+only cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was
+prayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the
+Christmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of
+primitive man and is as ancient as forest worship itself.
+
+And now he began.
+
+With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of the
+fir. This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of
+Bethlehem which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the
+Night of the Nativity--the Star of the New Born. But modern
+discoveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or
+five thousand years before the Christian era; and as far back as they
+have been traced, we find the wise men of the East worshipping this
+same star and being guided by it in their spiritual wanderings as they
+searched for the incarnation of the Divine. They worshipped it as the
+star of peace and goodness and purity. Many a pious Wolfram in those
+dim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn to the same star, for
+love of some Chaldean Elizabeth--both he and she blown about the
+desert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on these records the
+star and the Tree are brought together as here side by side.  And the
+story of the star leads backward to one of the first things that man
+ever worshipped as he looked beyond the forest: the light of the
+heavens floating in the depth of space--light that he wanted but could
+not grasp.
+
+He touched the next object on the Tree--the candle under the star--and
+went on:
+
+Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at the end of ages having
+caught this light--having brought it down in the language of his myth
+from heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in space as having
+become a star in his hand--the candle: the star worshipper had now
+become also the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back to the
+fire worshippers of ancient Persia--those highlands of the spirit
+seeking light. We think of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merely
+borrowed from the candle of the altar for the purpose of illumination;
+but the use of it goes back to a time when the forest worshipper, now
+also the fire worshipper, hung his lights on the trees, having no
+other altar. Far down toward modern times the temples of the old
+Prussians, for example, were oak groves, and among them a hierarchy of
+priests was ordained to keep the sacred fire perpetually burning at
+the root of the sacred oak.
+
+He touched the third object on the tree--the cross under the
+candle--and went on:
+
+"To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event:
+Calvary and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw
+and the apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that age
+thought of the cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Paul
+and the rest went down into their graves without so regarding it. The
+Magdalene never clung to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out at
+the foot of it the benizon of her tears. Not until the third century
+after Christ did the Bishops assembled at Nice announce it a Christian
+symbol. But it was a sacred emblem in the dateless antiquity of
+Egypt. To primitive man it stood for that sacred light and fire of
+life which was himself. For he himself is a cross--the first cross he
+has ever known. The faithful may truly think of the Son of Man as
+crucified as the image of humanity.  And thus ages before Christ,
+cross worship and forest worship were brought together: for instance,
+among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs of which made with
+the trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on these three they
+cut the names of three of their gods and this was holy-cross wood."
+
+He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on the
+tree--the dove under the cross, and went on:
+
+"In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white dove
+of the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the
+heavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends,
+overshadowing the Grail. But ages before Christ the prolific white
+dove of Syria was worshipped throughout the Orient as the symbol of
+reproductive Nature: and to this day the Almighty is there believed to
+manifest himself under this form. In ancient Mesopotamia the divine
+mother of nature is often represented with this dove as having
+actually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand. And here again
+forest worship early became associated with the worship of the dove;
+for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove nurtured in
+the oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and its wings
+an omen."
+
+On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story of
+each backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each was
+entwined with forest worship.
+
+He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, he
+said, was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of
+the vine. And vine worship was forest worship.  Moreover, in the same
+oak grove at Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and their
+tinklings also were sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boy
+beats on Christmas Day, was beaten ages before Christ in the worship
+of Confucius: the story of it dies away toward what was man's first
+written music in forgotten China.  In the first century of the
+Christian era, on one of the most splendid of the old Buddhist
+sculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the worship of
+the sacred tree--once more showing how music passed into the service
+of forest faith.
+
+He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram's
+horn--the primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and used
+also to pour out the last product of the vine in honor of the vine
+itself--the forest's first goblet.
+
+He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldest
+of all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learned
+to shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could at
+least bring to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring,
+the wild fruit of autumn.
+
+He kept on until only three things on the Tree were left
+uninterpreted; the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that
+he had left these to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the
+most trivial but really the most grave; for by means of them most
+clearly could be traced the presence of great law running through the
+progress of humanity.
+
+He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping it
+like a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course of
+ages it had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forest
+worship: a once universal custom of adorning the tree with everything
+most precious to the giver in token of his sacrifice and
+self-sacrifice.  Even in Jeremiah is an account of the lading of the
+sacred tree with gold and ornaments.  Herodotus relates that when
+Xerxes was invading Lydia, on the march he saw a divine tree and had
+it honored with golden robes and gifts. Livy narrates that when
+Romulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal City, he hung rich
+spoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this custom of
+decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until we can
+meet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece
+and in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.  Now the custom
+has dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree--the mock
+sacrifice for the real.
+
+He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind their
+mockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing
+prisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forest
+worship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this to
+have been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes.  In the course
+of time, when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mock
+countenance replaced the real.
+
+He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others,
+its long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificing
+children in forest worship. How common this custom was the early
+literature of the human race too abundantly testifies. We encounter
+the trace of it in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac--arrested by the
+command of Jehovah. But Abraham would never have thought of slaying
+his son to propitiate his God, had not the custom been well
+established.  In the case of Jephthah's daughter the sacrifice was
+actually allowed. We come upon the same custom in the fate of
+Iphigenia--at a critical turning point in the world's mercy; in her
+stead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac's case, was
+accepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against the
+inhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock for
+the real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of the
+Christmas Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive rites
+only these playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of the
+innocent.
+
+He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All the
+little stories, like pathways running backward into the distance and
+ever converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forest
+worship and they met in some sacrifice by the human heart.
+
+And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:
+
+"Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Tree
+is all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper could
+not worship without giving, because to worship is to give: therefore
+he brought his gifts to the forest--his first altar. These gifts,
+remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were his
+sacrifices and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since,
+the same law lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed the
+better to the worse; in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to
+the best. If the race should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, it
+would still have to worship what is highest in human nature and so
+worshipping, it would still be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice
+become the law of self-sacrifice: it would still be necessary to offer
+up what is low in us to what is higher. Only one portion of mankind
+has ever believed in Jerusalem; but every religion has known its own
+Calvary."
+
+He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited her
+appreciation. She had sat watching him without a movement and without
+a word.  But when at last she asked him a question, she spoke as a
+listener who wakens from a long revery.
+
+"Have you finished the story for me?" she inquired.
+
+"I have finished the story for you," he replied without betraying
+disappointment at her icy reception of it.
+
+Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head,
+turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throat
+showed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays of
+mistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:
+
+"You have not interpreted this," she said, her mind fixed on that sole
+omission.
+
+"I have not explained that," he admitted.
+
+She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest toward
+the manuscript on the table across the room.
+
+"Have you explained it there?"
+
+"I have not explained it there."
+
+"But why?" she said with disappointment.
+
+"I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine."
+
+"But why, Frederick?" she inquired, startled into wonderment.
+
+He smiled: "If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story."
+
+"But why do you not wish to tell me the story?"
+
+He answered with warning frankness: "If you once saw it as a picture,
+the picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life
+darkly."
+
+She protested: "If it is dark to you, why should I not share the
+darkness of it? Have we not always looked at life's shadows together?
+And thus seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us
+and dark things but half as dark?"
+
+He merely repeated his warning: "It is a story of a crueler age than
+ours. It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids."
+
+She answered: "So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to
+take seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from
+the forest worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not
+printed in books? Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in
+libraries to be read? If others read them, may not I? And since when
+must I begin to dread anything in books?  Or anything in life? And
+since when did we begin to look at life apart, we who have always
+looked at it with four eyes?"
+
+"I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things
+to see with two, and things to see with none."
+
+With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
+mistletoe.
+
+"Tell me the story of this!" she pleaded as though she demanded a
+right. As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they
+closed and went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the
+white pearls of the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and
+were broken apart and rolled across her breast into her lap.
+
+He looked grave; silence or speech--which were better for her? Either,
+he now saw, would give her pain.
+
+"Happily the story is far away from us," he said, as though he were
+half inclined to grant her request.
+
+"If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you
+brought the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the
+dove and the others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me!
+Steep me in it as you have steeped yourself!"
+
+He held back a long time: "You who are so safe in good, why know
+evil?"
+
+"Frederick," she cried, "I shall have to insist upon your telling me
+this story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know.
+Then tell it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give
+each heavy part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty--and truth be
+truth!"
+
+He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
+change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into
+the narrative of the historian:
+
+"Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
+Palestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening
+by the blue �gean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals--the
+living images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful
+eternity of Art--Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in
+the temple at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little
+children who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown
+soldiers of C�sar's legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the
+sacred grove of Dodona,--where the motions of oak boughs were
+auguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divine
+messages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine
+meanings,--in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of
+Ephesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites. To the
+south Pompeii, with its night laughter and song sounding far out
+toward the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes of its dread
+volcano, drained its goblet and did not care, emptied it as often as
+filled and asked for nothing more. A little distance off Herculaneum,
+with its tender dreams of Greece but with its arms around the
+breathing image of Italy, slept--uncovered.
+
+"Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps,
+lay unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the C�sar who was to conquer
+it; and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of
+Britain. All over that island one forest; in that forest one worship;
+in that worship one tree--the oak of England; and on that oak one
+bough--the mistletoe."
+
+He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had in
+the early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it was
+the tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah.  In Greece it was the
+tree of Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italy
+it was the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of
+mankind. After the gods passed, it became the tree of the imperial
+C�sars. After the C�sars had passed, it was the oak that Michael
+Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the ceiling of the Sistine
+Chapel near the creation of man and his expulsion from Paradise--there
+as always the chosen tree of human desire.  In Britain it was the
+sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests
+performed none of their rites without using its leaves and branches:
+never anywhere in the world was the oak worshipped with such
+ceremonies and sacrifices as there.
+
+Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forest
+worship: the New Year's day of the Druids.
+
+A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their
+way to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been
+found with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As the
+excited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of
+reverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is
+spread. In the midst of the assemblage one figure towers--the Arch
+Druid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own
+eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victims
+annually sacrificed to the oak.
+
+A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is
+clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough,
+and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden
+pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is
+blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each
+one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of
+which it is Nature's emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have
+never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are
+slaughtered in sacrifice.
+
+Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to
+itself, and the New Year's ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the
+oak is at an end.
+
+Here he ended the story.
+
+She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows
+knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in
+bewilderment:
+
+"But why did you call that a dark story?"  she asked. "Where is the
+cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will
+never throw a dark image on my mind: New Year's day--the winter
+woods--the journeying throng--the oak--the bough--the banquet
+beneath--the white bulls with fillets on their horns--the white-robed
+priest--the golden sickle in his hand--the stroke that severs the
+mistletoe--the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will
+be blessed in life's sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like
+to paint that scene.  In the centre should be some young girl,
+pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven's covenant with
+her under the guise of a blossom.  How could you have wished to
+withhold such a story from me?"
+
+He smiled at her a little sadly.
+
+"I have not yet told you all," he said, "but I have told you enough."
+
+Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under
+her breath one word escaped:
+
+"Ah!"
+
+It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown to
+her.
+
+"I am sparing you, Josephine!"
+
+She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the
+wood in her clutch.
+
+"Are you sparing me?" she asked in a tone of torture. "Or are you
+sparing yourself?"
+
+The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed
+grasp to the floor.  He looked down at it a moment and then calmly
+picked it up.
+
+"I am going to tell you the story," he said with a new quietness.
+
+She was aroused by some change in him.
+
+"I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!"
+
+"You will have to listen," he said. "It is better for you to
+know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the
+bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be
+impossible for you to misjudge."
+
+"I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I
+do not understand you are judging yourself!"
+
+He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himself
+up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right
+not to be pried into--not even by the nearest.
+
+The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer
+to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being
+thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his
+shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand
+of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial
+tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on
+him--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let its
+passing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned
+his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor
+likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood
+ankle-deep in forestry.
+
+This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of
+it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old
+forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest
+tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the
+earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she
+waited.
+
+He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the
+first sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:
+
+"Listen, Josephine!"
+
+She buried her face in her hands.
+
+"I cannot! I will not!"
+
+"You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my
+other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our
+people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first
+meaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forest
+survivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play and
+pastimes and lingering superstitions about the forest we cross faint
+traces of what were once vital realities.
+
+"Among these there has always been one that until recently I have
+never understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of
+everywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under the
+mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have
+always thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to
+some ancient rite--I could not discover what. Now I know."
+
+In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.
+
+It is another scene in the forest of Britain.  This time it is not the
+first day of the year--the New Year's day of the Druids when they
+celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer,
+perhaps the middle of May--May in England--with the young beauty of
+the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight.  The new moon is
+just silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the
+trees.  The hawthorn is in bloom--red and white--and not far from the
+spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing,
+singing, singing.
+
+Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of
+the woods--a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its
+youth and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the
+all-day sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild
+violet beds. Its huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though
+reaching for some object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as
+its badge of divine authority, worn there as a knight might wear the
+colors of his Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands--the
+Forest Lover.
+
+The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the
+moon's rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more
+passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.
+
+Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the
+scene a young girl enters--her hair hanging down--her limbs most
+lightly clad--the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her
+skin--in her eyes love's great need and mystery. Step by step she
+comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside
+thing may stay her strength.  She draws nearer to the oak, searching
+amid its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet
+more dreads not to find: the emblem of a woman's fruitfulness which
+the young oak--the Forest Lover--reaches down toward her.  Finding it,
+beneath it with one deep breath of surrender she takes her place--the
+virgin's tryst with the tree--there to be tested.
+
+Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience--submission to
+that test--or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has
+rejected.
+
+Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man
+enters--a tried and seasoned man--a human oak--counterpart of the
+Forest Lover--to officiate at the test.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence
+of his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of
+ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.
+
+_He_ was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was _his_
+feet that started toward the oak; _his_ eye that searched for the
+figure half fainting under the bough; for _him_ the bed of moss
+and violets--the hair falling over the eyes--the loosened girdle--the
+breasts of hawthorn white and pink--the listening song of the
+nightingale--the silence of the summer woods--the seclusion--the full
+surrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape
+the penalty of their own death.
+
+The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his
+own story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The
+light that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them--the
+old, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense
+nostrils.
+
+And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years
+before and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his
+lips--tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the
+room fell his words:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"
+
+The storm that had broken over him died away.  He shut his eyes on the
+vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.
+
+He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or
+he may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about
+himself.
+
+"This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine," he said quietly.
+
+She was sitting there before him--the mother of his children, of the
+sleeping ones, of the buried ones--the butterfly broken on the wheel
+of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.
+
+She sat there with the whiteness of death.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+
+
+The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white
+candles of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the
+room concealed its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar
+from the faithful tree beside the house wall had need now of its
+bitter rosary.
+
+Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit--the
+debt of courtesy and gratitude.
+
+"It is a wonderful story, Frederick," she said in a manner which
+showed him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to
+the end.
+
+"As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path
+into the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back
+what no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that
+I never dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your
+having done this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too
+much for me to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try
+to understand it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by
+waiting. But now there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to
+speak to you about that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some
+questions about the last part of the story. I have been wanting to ask
+you a long time: the story gives me the chance and--the right."
+
+He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen.
+
+"I will answer them," he said. "If they can be answered."
+
+And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers passed
+to and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn out
+of the deeps of life and sinking back into them.
+
+"Frederick," she said, "for many years we have been happy together, so
+happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us except
+the loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our
+years, lifted above life's storms. But of course I have realized that
+sooner or later our lot must become the common one: if we did not go
+down to Sorrow, Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the
+heights it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you to-night what
+I shall: I think fate's hour has struck for me; I am ready to hear
+it. Its arrow has already left the bow and is on its way; I open my
+heart to receive it. This is as I have always wished; I have said that
+if life had any greatest tragedy, for me, I hoped it would come when I
+was happiest; thus I should confront it all. I have never drunk half
+of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let the other half waste; I
+must go equally to the depth of any suffering.  Worse than the
+suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked some of
+it, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown myself
+a cowardly soul."
+
+After a pause she went over this subject as though she were not
+satisfied that she had made it clear.
+
+"I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief that
+comes to us in life when life is at its best--when no one is to
+blame--when no one has committed a fault--when suffering is meted out
+to us as the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. In
+earlier years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all of
+the world's poets felt the things that pass, even then I was wondering
+at the way in which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow it
+must be separated from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkening
+the bright disk of life's clear tragedy, thus rendering it less
+bravely seen.
+
+"And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor play
+with mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks
+of Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf's bane and twist the
+poison out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock;
+nor bind about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count
+over the berries of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of
+the beetle ticking in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death
+moth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl--the voice of ruins. Not
+these! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow
+are beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red peony just
+opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on the white foam, youth not
+yet faded but already fading, joy with its finger on his lips, bidding
+adieu.
+
+"And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life's
+tragedy. And to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: _I want to be
+told_."
+
+"If you can be told, you shall be told," he said.
+
+She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and
+composure. Then she began:
+
+"Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college
+friend. You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and
+celebrated the German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to
+have the Christmas Tree in our house--through memory of him and of
+those years. You have often described to me how you and he in summer
+went Alpine climbing, and far up in some green valley girdled with
+glaciers lay of afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drowsing
+in the crystalline air. You told me of your nights of wandering down
+the Rhine together when the heart turns so intimately to the heart
+beside it. He was German youth and song and dream and happiness to
+you. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer over the
+crevasse, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you that
+began to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at the
+friendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret for
+him?"
+
+He answered out of the ideals of his youth:
+
+"The longer I knew him, the more I loved him.  I never tired of being
+with him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When he
+was lost, the whole world lost some of its strength and
+nobility. After all the years, if he could come back, he would find me
+unchanged--that friend of my youth!"
+
+With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:
+
+"The doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor, your
+closest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor;
+he is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talking
+with one another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor and
+wish him away?  Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keep
+secret from me? Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend of
+your middle life?"
+
+"The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. I
+never tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have no
+disguises with him and need none."
+
+"The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them?
+Do they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference?  Have
+Harold and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you?
+Do you ever unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?"
+
+"The older they grow, the more I love them.  The more they interest me
+and tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with them
+and I live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming."
+
+"Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does it
+develop in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you the
+regret to be something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad to
+toil?"
+
+"As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down the
+stag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs for
+fortune, as the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the
+cross, I follow my work, I follow my work."
+
+"Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the world
+still morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you begin
+to tire and to think of rest?"
+
+"The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to his
+work. Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and why
+it exists at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what
+it hates; why it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless
+when it should be true; how civilized man can fight single handed
+against the ages that were his lower past--how he can develop
+self-renunciation out of selfishness and his own wisdom out of
+surrounding folly,--all these are questions that mean more and
+more. My work is but beginning and the world is morning."
+
+"This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would you
+rather move into a new one?"
+
+"I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take its
+place. Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care more
+for it now that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were a
+ruin, I should love it best!"
+
+She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet.
+
+"Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?"
+
+"I think more of them and take better care of them now that their
+hunting days are over."
+
+"The friend of your youth--the friend of your middle age--the
+children--your profession--the world of human life--this house--the
+dogs of the house--you care more for them all as time passes?"
+
+"I care more for them all as time passes."
+
+Then there came a great stillness in the room--the stillness of all
+listening years.
+
+"Am I the only thing that you care less for as time passes?"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+"Am I in the way?"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+"Would you like to go over it all again with another?"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against the
+end of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape
+being touched by him--to escape the blow of his words. No words
+came. There was no touch.
+
+A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, looking
+down at her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck.
+He must be kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with a
+kind of incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At first
+she could so little believe it, that with her face still buried in one
+hand she searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touch
+him.
+
+Then she cried out to him:
+
+"Isn't there anything you can say to me?"
+
+Silence lasted.
+
+"_Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred_!"
+
+In the stillness she began to hear something--the sound of his
+footsteps moving on the carpet.  She sat up.
+
+The room was getting darker; he was putting out the candles. It was
+too dark already to see his face. With fascination she began to watch
+his hand. How steady it was as it moved among the boughs,
+extinguishing the lights. Out they went one by one and back into their
+darkness returned the emblems of darker ages--the Forest Memories.
+
+A solitary taper was left burning at the pinnacle of the Tree under
+the cross: that highest torch of love shining on everything that had
+disappeared.
+
+He quietly put it out.
+
+Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly to have travelled
+through the open parlor door into the adjoining room, her bedroom; for
+out of that there now streamed a suffused red light; it came from the
+lamp near the great bed in the shadowy corner.
+
+This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance of
+a bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with the
+weight of its own splendor falls face downward on the grass. And in
+that room this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winter
+draperies.  He had been living alone as a bachelor before he married
+her. After they became engaged he, having watched for some favorite
+color of hers, had had this room redecorated in that shade. Every
+winter since she had renewed in this way or that way these hangings,
+and now the bridal draperies remained unchanged--after the changing
+years.
+
+He replaced the taper against the wall and came over and stood before
+her, holding out his hands to help her rise.
+
+She arose without his aid and passed around him, moving toward her
+bedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, he
+followed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom and
+crossed to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping
+her face bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closed
+the door on him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with which
+the soul tears out of itself something that has been its life, she
+made a circlet of her white arms against the door and laid her profile
+within this circlet and stood--the figure of Memory.
+
+Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tomb
+where some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a far
+land,--walking some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all human
+stories end; an autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of its
+mortality and his heart singing with the bird of one lost to him--lost
+to him in his own country.
+
+On the other side of the door the silence was that of a tomb. She had
+felt confident--so far as she had expected anything--that he would
+speak to her through the door, try to open it, plead with her to open
+it. Nothing of the kind occurred.
+
+Why did he not come back? What bolt could have separated her from him?
+
+The silence began to weigh upon her.
+
+Then in the tense stillness she heard him moving quietly about,
+getting ready for bed.  There were the same movements, familiar to her
+for years. She would not open the door, she could not leave it, she
+could not stand, no support was near, and she sank to the floor and
+sat there, leaning her brow against the lintel.
+
+On the other side the quiet preparations went on.
+
+She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back of
+a chair. The buttons made a little scraping sound against the wood.
+Then he went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and he
+opened a drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking of
+a chair under him as he threw one foot and then the other up across
+his knee and took off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her the
+soft movements of his bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony the
+old impulse started in her to caution him about his slippers). Then
+followed the brushing of his teeth and the deliberate bathing of his
+hands. Then was audible the puff of breath with which he blew out his
+lamp after he had turned it low; and then,--on the other side of the
+door,--just above her ear his knock sounded.
+
+The same knock waited for and responded to throughout the years; so
+often with his little variations of playfulness. Many a time in early
+summer when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing some
+bird sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood--that tap of
+heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear.
+
+Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though her
+flesh were but will and spirit. When he knocked again, she was across
+the room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her palms pressed
+together and thrust between her knees: the instinctive act of a human
+animal suddenly chilled to the bone.
+
+The knocking sounded again.
+
+"Was there anything you needed?" she asked fearfully.
+
+There was no response but another knock.
+
+She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure that it would reach him.
+
+"Was there anything you wanted?"
+
+As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greater
+alarm, and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated her
+one question:
+
+"Did you forget anything?"
+
+Her mind refused to release itself from the iteration of that idea: it
+was some _thing_--not herself--that he wanted.
+
+He knocked.
+
+Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, now made of his knock
+some signal of distress.  It took on the authority of an appeal not to
+be denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a little way, and once
+more she asked her one poor question.
+
+His answer to it came in the form of a gentle pressure against the
+door, breaking down her resistance. As she applied more strength, this
+was as gently overcome; and when the opening was sufficient, he walked
+past her into the room.
+
+How hushed the house! How still the world outside as the cloud wove in
+darkness its mantle of light!
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+
+
+Day was breaking.
+
+The crimson curtains of the bedroom were drawn close, but from behind
+their outer edges faint flanges of light began to advance along the
+wall. It was a clear light reflected from snow which had sifted in
+against the window-panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged the
+yard fence, peaked the little gate-posts, and buried the shrubbery.
+There was no need to look out in order to know that it had stopped
+snowing, that the air was windless, and that the stars were flashing
+silver-pale except one--great golden-croziered shepherd of the thick,
+soft-footed, moving host.
+
+It was Christmas morning on the effulgent Shield.
+
+Already there was sufficient light in the room to reveal--less as
+actual things than as brown shadows of the memory--a gay company of
+socks and stockings hanging from the mantelpiece; sufficient to give
+outline to the bulk of a man asleep on the edge of the bed; and it
+exposed to view in a corner of the room farthest from the rays a woman
+sitting in a straight-backed chair, a shawl thrown about her shoulders
+over her night-dress.
+
+He always slept till he was awakened; the children, having stayed up
+past their usual bedtime, would sleep late also; she had the white
+dawn to herself in quietness.
+
+She needed it.
+
+Sleep could not have come to her had she wished. She had not slept and
+she had not lain down, and the sole endeavor during those shattered
+hours had been to prepare herself for his awakening. She was not yet
+ready--she felt that during the rest of her life she should never be
+quite ready to meet him again. Scant time remained now.
+
+Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment and outdoor noises would
+begin. Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of its
+size, rose by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town was
+proud of its smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields;
+whereever any hamlet marked the point at which two country roads this
+morning made the sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudly
+castled on woody hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder from
+amid their olive-dark winter pastures; or far away on the shaggy
+uplift of the Shield wherever any cabin clung like a swallow's nest
+against the gray Appalachian wall--everywhere soon would begin the
+healthy outbreak of joy among men and women and children--glad about
+themselves, glad in one another, glad of human life in a happy
+world. The many-voiced roar and din of this warm carnival lay not far
+away from her across the cold bar of silence.
+
+Soon within the house likewise the rush of the children's feet would
+startle her ear; they would be tugging at the door, tugging at her
+heart.  And as she thought of this, the recollection of old simple
+things came pealing back to her from behind life's hills. The years
+parted like naked frozen reeds, and she, sorely stricken in her
+womanhood, fled backward till she herself was a child again--safe in
+her father's and mother's protection. It was Christmas morning, and
+she in bare feet was tipping over the cold floors toward their
+bedroom--toward her stockings.
+
+Her father and mother! How she needed them at this moment: they had
+been sweethearts all their lives. One picture of them rose with
+distinctness before her--for the wounding picture always comes to the
+wounded moment. She saw them sitting in their pew far down toward the
+chancel. Through a stained glass window (where there was a ladder of
+angels) the light fell softly on them--both silver-haired; and as with
+the voices of children they were singing out of one book. She
+remembered how as she sat between them she had observed her father
+slip his hand into her mother's lap and clasp hers with a
+steadfastness that wedded her for eternity; and thus over their linked
+hands, with the love of their youth within them and the snows of the
+years upon them, they sang together:
+
+  "Gently, Lord, O gently lead us
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+  "Through the changes Thou'st decreed us."
+
+Her father and mother had not been led gently.  They had known more
+than common share of life's shocks and violence, its wrongs and
+meannesses and ills and griefs. But their faith had never wavered that
+they were being led gently; so long as they were led together, to them
+it was gentle leading: the richer each in each for aught whereby
+nature or man could leave them poorer; the calmer for the shocks; the
+sweeter for the sour; the finer with one another because of life's
+rudenesses.  In after years she often thought of them as faithful in
+their dust; and the flowers she planted over them and watered many a
+bright day with happy tears brought up to her in another form the
+freshness of their unwearied union.
+
+That was what she had not doubted her own life would be--with
+him--when she had married him.
+
+From the moment of the night before when he had forced the door open
+and entered her room, they had not exchanged any words nor a glance.
+He had lain down and soon fallen asleep; apparently he had offered
+that to her as for the moment at least his solution of the
+matter--that he should leave her to herself and absent himself in
+slumber.
+
+The instant she knew him to be asleep she set about her preparations.
+
+Before he awoke she must be gone--out of the house--anywhere--to save
+herself from living any longer with him. His indifference in the
+presence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touch
+and glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life's
+valleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing the
+whole truth, know it she should: all this left her wounded and stunned
+as by an incredible blow, and she was acting first from the instinct
+of removing herself beyond the reach of further humiliation and
+brutality.
+
+Instinctively she took off her wedding ring and laid it on his dresser
+beside his watch: he would find it there in the morning and he could
+dispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the plainest heavy one
+and put on heavy walking shoes. She packed into a handbag a few
+necessary things with some heirlooms of her own. Among the latter was
+a case of family jewels; and as she opened it, her eyes fell upon her
+mother's thin wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped that
+on and kissed it bitterly. She lifted out also her mother's locket
+containing a miniature daguerreotype of her father and dutifully fed
+her eyes on that. Her father was not silver-haired then, but
+raven-locked; with eyes that men feared at times but no woman ever.
+
+His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbed
+her exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she,
+coarsely wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, opened
+her front door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, and
+passed out--wading away. Those eyes of his saw what took place the
+next day: the happiness of Christmas morning turned into horror; the
+children wild with distress and crying--the servants dumb--the inquiry
+at neighbors' houses--the news spreading to the town--the papers--the
+black ruin. And from him two restraining words issued for her ear:
+
+"My daughter!"
+
+Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answered
+him. And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her blood
+took fire and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. She
+stopped her preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel.
+
+She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its
+place with exaggerated pains.  Having done this, she stood in the
+middle of the floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to
+that power of low suggestion which is one of anger's weapons, she
+began to devise malice.  She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took
+from a bottom drawer--where long ago it had been stored away under
+everything else--a shawl that had been her grandmother's; a brindled
+crewel shawl,--sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former
+generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she
+had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her
+ugliness and decrepitude.
+
+She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around
+her shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting
+it off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She
+turned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge
+lidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew
+a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put her
+forefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding places
+under the mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let these
+hang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefully
+nourished look of youth from her face--dropped the will to look
+young--and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it--into the
+wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, assisting each other so
+ably, had wrought in her.
+
+She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of
+the lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in
+exultation of vengeance that she was to live on there in his
+house--_his_ house.
+
+After a while a darker mood came over her.
+
+With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the
+room. She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it
+would be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber
+was heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat--with
+furtive look to see whether he observed her.
+
+A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.
+
+Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was
+Anglo-Saxon blood of the world's fiercest; floating in the tide of it
+passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in
+tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but
+fiercest ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A
+thousand years from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting
+beside some sleeping father of hers in their forest-beleaguered
+castle--the moonlight streaming in upon him through the javelined
+casement and putting before her the manly beauty of him--the blond
+hair matted thick on his forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth
+reddening in his slumber under its curling gold--some mother of hers
+whom he had carried off from other men by might of his sword, thus
+sitting beside him and knowing him to be colder to her now than the
+moon's dead rays, might have watched those rays as they travelled away
+from his figure and put a gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousand
+years ago: some mother of hers.
+
+It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers
+so often to take its place.  The best and the worst--these are the
+sole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making:
+hence life's spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever
+present about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the
+best as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to the
+standard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one may
+think of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the story
+that it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far:
+how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many a
+time they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabit
+such a privileged highland.
+
+During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the
+tragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a
+height of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to
+the lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or
+as the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as is
+unfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed the
+grateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light. All evil
+prompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be
+justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she was
+dragging herself out of life's quicksands upward to some rock, where
+there might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness.
+The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatred
+is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needs
+not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.
+
+He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its
+faithlessness and low carnal propensities.  What rankled most
+poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact
+that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain
+tops--that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling
+near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable
+to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now
+his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words
+about the growth of the world's spirit--about the sacrifice of the
+lower in ourselves to the higher--this cant now became to her the
+invocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carried
+the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of
+Immortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality.
+
+Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with
+spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when
+he had let her know that he wanted to be free--at that moment she
+might tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his
+unworthiness.
+
+And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the
+devil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.
+
+Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon
+companions. And at one period of the night she began to look back upon
+her experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity--to see it as
+a story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the
+first stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way into
+the care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the
+confidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and that
+receive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novels
+of the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent years
+studied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation's press, the
+nation's science of medicine, the nation's science of law, the
+nation's practice of religion, and the nation's imaginative literature
+were all at work with the same national omen--the decay of the
+American family and the downfall of the home.
+
+Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had
+incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where
+the older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation
+rock. The corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited
+her; and thus to-night she took her place among those women whom the
+world first hears of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of
+refuge and in their graves--and more sadly elsewhere; whose
+misfortunes interested the press and whose types attracted the
+novelists.
+
+She was one of them.
+
+They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who
+unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity--or walks
+into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under
+another name or with another lot lives on--devoting herself to memory
+or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to
+the world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains
+to her but living apart--on the other side of the locked door; the
+woman who stays on without locking the door, half-hating,
+half-loving--the accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who
+welcomes the end of the love-drama as the beginning of peace and the
+cessation of annoyances; the woman who begins to act her tragedy to
+servants and children and acquaintances--reaping sympathy for herself
+and sowing ruin and torture--for him; the woman who drops the care of
+house, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value
+as at least an investment toward his general well-being; the woman who
+endeavors to rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh
+fascinations; the woman who plays upon jealousy and touches the male
+instinct to keep one's own though little prized lest another acquire
+it and prize it more; the woman who sets a watch to discover the other
+woman: they swarmed about her, she identified each.
+
+And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their
+companionship; a strange dread moved her lest _they_ should
+discover _her_. One only she detached from the throng and for a
+while withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who
+when so rejected turns to another man--the man who is waiting
+somewhere near.
+
+The man _she_ turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the
+country doctor, her husband's tried and closest friend, whose children
+were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years
+_her_ secret had been--the doctor.  When she had come as a bride
+into that neighborhood, he, her husband's senior by several years, was
+already well established in his practice. He had attended her at the
+birth of her first child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had
+discovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This had
+dealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and he
+welcomed the wound.
+
+Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from
+the turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep
+alongside her, she could hear the doctor's buggy passing on its way to
+some patient, or on its return from the town where he had patients
+also. Many a time she had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of
+his life there turned in to her. There were nights of pitch darkness
+and beating rain; and sometimes on these she had to know that he was
+out there.
+
+Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where
+her husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the
+doctor. He would be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with
+him.
+
+Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and enveloped
+it. She groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old lost
+human paths.
+
+The endless night scarcely moved on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was wearied out, she was exhausted.  There is anger of such
+intensity that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations that
+are its fuel; nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame,
+and being unfed, it dies out.  Moreover, it is the destiny of a
+portion of mankind that they are enjoined by their very nobility from
+winning low battles; these always go against them: the only victories
+for them are won when they are leading the higher forces of human
+nature in life's upward conflicts.
+
+She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neither
+moral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundless
+plain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm;
+and slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like
+the radiance of the storm-winged sky.
+
+And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures
+appeared--her children.  Hitherto the energies of her mind had
+grappled with the problem of her future; now memories began--memories
+that decide more perhaps than anything else for us. And memories began
+with her children.
+
+She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it
+with the palm of her hand, started upstairs.
+
+There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear
+stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the
+broad stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit
+she started to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew
+back. This room had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the
+Years. She shrank from it as one who has been arraigned may shrink
+from a tribunal where sentence has been pronounced which changes the
+rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, but
+deepened the derision and the bitterness. And the evergreen there in
+the middle of the room--it became to her as that tree of the knowledge
+of good and evil which at Creation's morning had driven Woman from
+Paradise.
+
+She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house,
+but paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he
+should awake in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was?
+Would he call out to her--with what voice? Would he come to seek
+her--with what emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now--the
+drift back to the old mooring.)
+
+Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear of
+remembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to
+the last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seek
+her. It had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room to
+room for the delight of proving how persistently he would prolong his
+search. But one day some two years before this, when she had entered
+his study about the usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for his
+writing desk, she saw him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on,
+making some notes. The sight had struck the flowers from her hands;
+she swiftly gathered them up, and going to her room, shut herself in;
+she knew it was the beginning of the end.
+
+The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre of
+the bedchamber.
+
+When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he had
+done or failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself.
+Everything else had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; the
+old touch abandoning the hands; less time for her in the house, more
+for work; constraint beginning between them, the awkwardness of
+reserve; she seeing Nature's movement yet refusing to believe it; then
+at last resolving to know to the uttermost and choosing her bridal
+night as the hour of the ordeal.
+
+If he awoke, would he come to seek her--with what feelings?
+
+She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her right
+hand and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There was
+a turn in the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle rays
+fell on the face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on a
+step, putting the candle beside her; and there she remained, her
+elbows on her knees, her face resting on her palms; and into the abyss
+of the night dropped the tranquil strokes. More memories!
+
+She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding
+lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness
+overflowing its dumb environs--humanizing these--drawing them toward
+her by a gracious responsive symbolism--extending speech over realms
+which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have struck
+into speechlessness long �ons past.
+
+She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden God of Hours; she had
+often feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of it
+she would pin inside the walls little clusters of blossoms as votive
+offerings: if it would only move faster and bring him home!  The usual
+hour of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She had
+symbolized that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for the
+children--the three in one--the trinity of the household.
+
+She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her.
+
+The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him,
+up to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: all
+is well!
+
+It was the first sound that had reached her from any source during
+this agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outside
+humanity; from Time itself which brings us together and holds us
+together as long as possible and then separates us and goes on its
+way--indifferent whether we are together or apart; Time which welds
+the sands into the rock and then wears the rock away to its separate
+sands and sends the level tide softly over them.
+
+Once for him, once for her, once for the children!  She took up the
+candle and went upstairs to them.
+
+For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two little
+girls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and in
+another room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turned
+on one another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fist
+outside the cover. In a few years how differently the four would be
+divided and paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife;
+and out of the lives of the two of them who were hers she would then
+drop into some second place. If to-night she were realizing what
+befalls a wife when she becomes the Incident to her husband, she would
+then realize what befalls a woman when the mother becomes the Incident
+to her children: Woman, twice the Incident in Nature's impartial
+economy! Her son would playfully confide it to his bride that she must
+bear with his mother's whims and ways. Her daughter would caution her
+husband that he must overlook peculiarities and weaknesses. The very
+study of perfection which she herself had kindled and fanned in them
+as the illumination of their lives they would now turn upon her as a
+searchlight of her failings.
+
+He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of his
+discussing her with any human being. Even though he should some day
+desert her, he would never discuss her.
+
+She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with her
+against the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strength
+from her to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow.  But now she
+began to ask herself whether his protection _had_ failed her.
+Could he have recognized the situation without rendering it
+worse?  Had he put his arms around her, might she not have--struck at
+him? Had he laid a finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not have
+left a scar for life? Any words of his, would they not have rung in
+her ears unceasingly? To pass it over was as though it had never
+been--was not _that_ his protection?
+
+She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed her
+child in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor's
+children--with memory of their mother; and then she descended by the
+rear stairway.
+
+She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she had
+placed the lamp--near the manuscript--and she sat down and looked at
+that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there.
+
+He had made her the gift of his work--dedicated to her the triumphs of
+his toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his widening
+career and enter with him into the world's service.  She crossed her
+hands over it awhile, and then she left it.
+
+The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the
+immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.
+After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the
+echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music
+only,--the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She
+sat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear
+began faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of his story.
+
+One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watch
+the youth of the hemp--a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If
+the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulse
+swayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads
+were instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and east
+wind sent it west.
+
+And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we
+sometimes call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It is
+run through by many different laws; governed by many distinct forces,
+each of which strives to control it wholly--but never does.
+Selfishness blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all things
+seem to bow to the might of selfishness. Generosity moves across the
+expanse, and all things are seen responsive to what is generous. Place
+yourself where life is lowest and everything like an avalanche is
+rushing to the bottom. Place yourself where character is highest, and
+lo! the whole world is but one struggle upward to what is high. You
+see what you care to see, and find what you wish to find.
+
+In his story of the Forest and the Heart he had wanted to trace but
+one law, and he had traced it; he had drawn all things together and
+bent them before its majesty: the ancient law of Sacrifice. Of old the
+high sacrificed to the low; afterwards the low to the high: once the
+sacrifice of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but always in
+ourselves of the lower to the higher in order that, dying, we may
+live.
+
+With this law he had made his story a story of the world.
+
+The star on the Tree bore it back to Chald�a; the candle bore it to
+ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the
+dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it
+to Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and
+Rome; the doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe
+to Britain,--and all brought it to Christ,--Christ the latest
+world-ideal of sacrifice that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of
+all for all.
+
+The story was for herself, he had said, and for himself.
+
+Himself! Here at last all her pain and wandering of this night ended:
+at the bottom of her wound where rankled _his problem_.
+
+From this problem she had most shrunk and into this she now entered:
+She sacrificed herself in him! She laid upon herself his temptation
+and his struggle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Taking her candle, she passed back into her bedroom and screened it
+where she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom.
+
+She put her wedding ring on again with blanched lips. She went to his
+bedside, and drawing to the pillow the chair on which his clothes were
+piled, sat down and laid her face over on it; and there in that shrine
+of feeling where speech is formed, but whence it never issues, she
+made her last communion with him:
+
+_"You, to whom I gave my youth and all that youth could mean to me;
+whose children I have borne and nurtured at my breast--all of whose
+eyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of whom I have closed;
+husband of my girlhood, loved as no woman ever loved the man who took
+her home; strength and laughter of his house; helper of what is best
+in me; my defender against things in myself that I cannot govern;
+pathfinder of my future; rock of the ebbing years! Though my hair turn
+white as driven snow and flesh wither to the bone, I shall never cease
+to be the flame that you yourself have kindled.
+
+"But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where there
+must be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heard
+our whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences--the
+Long Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clung
+to!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!"_
+
+She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would
+not lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his
+pillow the last drop of things that must go.
+
+She there--her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life's
+Calvary of the Snows.
+
+The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, and
+there it brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near when
+she must awaken him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over before
+the children rushed downstairs or the servants knocked.
+
+She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the
+gray told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly
+away from brow and temples so that the contour of her head--one of
+nature's noblest--was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the
+women of her land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of
+their baptism into a new life.
+
+She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders rising
+out of this had the austerity of marble--exempt not from ruin, but
+exempt from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once and
+made a little instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide them
+under the sleeves.
+
+Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and
+quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it.
+Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes--the look
+of the rejected.
+
+So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed,
+resting on one elbow and looking down at him.
+
+For years her first words to him on this day had been the world's best
+greeting:
+
+"A Merry Christmas!"
+
+She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready.
+
+At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and
+instantly looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out
+of it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what their future
+would be worth. But at the sight of her so changed--something so gone
+out of her forever--with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She
+struggled to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly
+about the youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his
+face. She caught at one of the braids of her hair and threw it across
+her eyes, and then silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her.
+The torrent of her tears raining down into his tears.
+
+Tears not for Life's faults but for Life when there are no
+faults. They locked in each other's arms--trying to save each other on
+Nature's vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea.
+
+The rush of children's feet was heard in the hall and there was
+smothered laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob.
+
+It was Christmas Morning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward over
+the gladness of the Shield.  The farmhouse--such as the poet had sung
+of when he could not help singing of American home life--looked out
+from under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller
+who laughs at the snow on his hat and shoulders.  Smoke poured out of
+its chimneys, bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak
+tree beside it stood quieted of its moaning and tossing.  Soon after
+sunrise a soul of passion on scarlet wings, rising out of the
+snow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a topmost twig of the oak; and
+sitting there with its breast to the gorgeous sun scanned for a little
+while that landscape of ice. It was beyond its intelligence to
+understand how nature could create it for Summer and then take Summer
+away. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a sun so
+true could shine on a world so false.
+
+Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovelling
+paths. After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with
+fireside warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat,
+rushed out of the front door pursued by a little soldier sternly
+booted and capped and gloved; and the two snowballed each other, going
+at it furiously. Watching them through a window a little girl, dancing
+a dreamy measure of her own, ever turned inward and beckoned to some
+one to come and look--beckoned in vain.
+
+All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the little
+girl played with the doll--hugged to her breast the symbol of ancient
+sacrifice, the emblem of the world's new mercy. Along the turnpike
+sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and the
+shouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across the
+shining valleys.
+
+Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!
+
+One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from its
+surroundings; just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low,
+thick, covered with snow except where a bough had been broken off for
+decorating the house; here owing to the steepness the snow slid
+off. The spot looked like a wound in the side of the Divine purity,
+and across this open wound the tree had hung its rosary-beads never to
+be told by Sorrow's fingers.
+
+The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backward
+across the sadness of the Shield.  One by one the stars came back to
+their faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinging
+lamp was lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little round
+mats of snow stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost a
+low Christmas star was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; and
+between those beacons soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and
+children assembling for the party.
+
+Late into the night the party lasted.
+
+The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went to
+ashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and the
+robust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of our
+life. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate and
+drank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to go
+faster than the music.
+
+The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on the
+Christmas Tree--the handing over to this person and to that person of
+those unread lessons of the ages--little mummied packages of the lord
+of time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced those
+burnt out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were white
+now.
+
+Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene!
+Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house:
+hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughing
+and talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to the
+doctor's wife--faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be the
+American wife and mother in the home of the poet's dream: the
+spiritual majesty of her bridal veil still about her amid life's snow
+as it never lifts itself from the face of the _Jungfrau_ amid the
+sad most lovely mountains: the American wife and mother!--herself the
+_Jungfrau_ among the world's women!
+
+The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takes
+place there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the State
+which is also a song of the Nation--its melody of the unfallen home:
+with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated at
+the piano--the others upholding her like a living bulwark.
+
+There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of:
+those Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the
+embodied--the Guests of the Imagination.
+
+The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambers
+arm and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that present
+scene nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree the
+Wraiths of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naught
+of those later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to fill
+their places. Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes
+that bent undivided attention upon the actual pageant: these were
+Life's Pities. Ever and anon they would lift their noble veils and
+look out upon that brief flicker of our mortal joy, and drop them and
+relapse into their compassionate vigil.
+
+But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filled
+the entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through the
+rooms with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckoned
+her to a place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered back
+peeped shyly at her but then with some sure instinct of recognition
+ran to her and threw down their gifts, to put their arms around
+her. And the Pities before they left the house that night walked past
+her one by one and each lifted its veil and dropped it more softly.
+
+This was the Shape:
+
+In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet under the
+chandelier--which had no decoration whatsoever--stood an exquisite
+Spirit of Youth, more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet most
+alive; her lips scarce parted--her skin like white hawthorn shadowed
+by pink--in her eyes the modesty of withdrawal from Love--in her heart
+the surrender to it. During those distracting hours never did she move
+nor did her look once change: she waiting there--waiting for some one
+to come--waiting.
+
+Waiting.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
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+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      The Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
+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: Bride of the Mistletoe
+
+Author: James Lane Allen
+
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9179]
+This file was first posted on September 11, 2003
+Last Updated: October 30, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
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+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By James Lane Allen
+    </h2>
+    <h5>
+      Author Of &ldquo;Flute And Violin,&rdquo; &ldquo;A Kentucky Cardinal,&rdquo; &ldquo;Aftermath,&rdquo; Etc.
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>TO ONE WHO KNOWS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raissoner. Mais il faut
+      regarder beaucoup et songer à ce qu&rsquo;on a vu. Voir: tout est là, et voir
+      juste. J&rsquo;entends, par voir juste, voir avec ses propres yeux et non avec
+      ceux des maîtres. L&rsquo;originalité d&rsquo;un artiste s&rsquo;indique d&rsquo;abord dans les
+      petites choses et non dans les grandes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n&rsquo;a pas encore découverte
+      et tâcher de l&rsquo;exprimer d&rsquo;une façon personelle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Any one about to read this work of fiction might properly be apprised
+      beforehand that it is not a novel: it has neither the structure nor the
+      purpose of The Novel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a story. There are two characters&mdash;a middle-aged married couple
+      living in a plain farmhouse; one point on the field of human nature is
+      located; at that point one subject is treated; in the treatment one
+      movement is directed toward one climax; no external event whatsoever is
+      introduced; and the time is about forty hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A second story of equal length, laid in the same house, is expected to
+      appear within a twelvemonth. The same father and mother are characters,
+      and the family friend the country doctor; but subordinately all. The main
+      story concerns itself with the four children of the two households.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an American children&rsquo;s story:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Brood of The Eagle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the year a third work, not fiction, will be published, entitled:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Christmas Tree: An Interpretation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The three works will serve to complete each other, and they complete a
+      cycle of the theme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> IV. THE WANDERING TALE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VI. THE WHITE DAWN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A mighty table-land lies southward in a hardy region of our country. It
+      has the form of a colossal Shield, lacking and broken in some of its
+      outlines and rough and rude of make. Nature forged it for some crisis in
+      her long warfare of time and change, made use of it, and so left it lying
+      as one of her ancient battle-pieces&mdash;Kentucky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Shield is raised high out of the earth at one end and sunk deep
+      into it at the other. It is tilted away from the dawn toward the sunset.
+      Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet, Nature, cunning
+      artificer, set the stream of ocean flowing past with restless foam&mdash;the
+      Father of Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound a bright river to
+      the rim of silver. And where the eastern part rises loftiest on the
+      horizon, turned away from the reddening daybreak, she piled shaggy
+      mountains wooded with trees that loose their leaves ere snowflakes fly and
+      with steadfast evergreens which hold to theirs through the gladdening and
+      the saddening year. Then crosswise over the middle of the Shield,
+      northward and southward upon the breadth of it, covering the life-born
+      rock of many thicknesses, she drew a tough skin of verdure&mdash;a broad
+      strip of hide of the ever growing grass. She embossed noble forests on
+      this greensward and under the forests drew clear waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This she did in a time of which we know nothing&mdash;uncharted ages
+      before man had emerged from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder,
+      thoughts to wander, heart to love, and spirit to pray. Many a scene the
+      same power has wrought out upon the surface of the Shield since she
+      brought him forth and set him there: many an old one, many a new. She has
+      made it sometimes a Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace. Nor has
+      she yet finished with its destinies as she has not yet finished with
+      anything in the universe. While therefore she continues her will and
+      pleasure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not forget the Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which admonish man how little
+      his lot has changed since Hephaistos wrought like scenes upon the shield
+      of Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like a falcon from snowy
+      Olympus bearing the glittering piece of armor to her angered son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are some of the scenes that were wrought on the shield of Achilles
+      and that to-day are spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze of lights as they lead the
+      bride from her chamber, flutes and violins sounding merrily. An
+      assembly-place where the people are gathered, a strife having arisen about
+      the blood-price of a man slain; the old lawyers stand up one after another
+      and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, freshly ploughed fields
+      where ploughmen drive their teams to and fro, the earth growing dark
+      behind the share. The estate of a landowner where laborers are reaping;
+      some armfuls the binders are binding with twisted bands of straw: among
+      them the farmer is standing in silence, leaning on his staff, rejoicing in
+      his heart. Vineyards with purpling clusters and happy folk gathering these
+      in plaited baskets on sunny afternoons. A herd of cattle with incurved
+      horns hurrying from the stable to the woods where there is running water
+      and where purple-topped weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen with
+      white sheep. A dancing-place under the trees; girls and young men dancing,
+      their fingers on one another&rsquo;s wrists: a great company stands watching the
+      lovely dance of joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles as art; as pageants of
+      life they appear on the Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker of old
+      wrought them upon the armor of the Greek warrior in tin and silver, bronze
+      and gold. The world-designer sets them to-day on the throbbing land in
+      nerve and blood, toil and delight and passion. But there with the old
+      things she mingles new things, with the never changing the ever changing;
+      for the old that remains always the new and the new that perpetually
+      becomes old&mdash;these Nature allots to man as his two portions wherewith
+      he must abide steadfast in what he is and go upward or go downward through
+      all that he is to become.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of the many scenes which she in our time sets forth upon the stately
+      grassy Shield there is a single spectacle that she spreads over the length
+      and breadth of it once every year now as best liked by the entire people;
+      and this is both old and new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is old because it contains man&rsquo;s faith in his immortality, which was
+      venerable with age before the shield of Achilles ever grew effulgent
+      before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new because it contains those
+      latest hopes and reasons for this faith, which briefly blossom out upon
+      the primitive stock with the altering years and soon are blown away upon
+      the winds of change. Since this spectacle, this festival, is thus old and
+      is thus new and thus enwraps the deepest thing in the human spirit, it is
+      never forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or sows in the teeth of the
+      wind and glances at the fickle sky; when under the summer shade of a
+      flowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted herds and fattening
+      grain; whether there is autumnal plenty in his barn or autumnal emptiness,
+      autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal strife,&mdash;all days of the
+      year, in the assembly-place, in the dancing-place, whatsoever of good or
+      ill befall in mind or hand, never does one forget.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seems farthest
+      from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when the fields lie shorn
+      between harvest-time and seed-time and man turns wistful eyes back and
+      forth between the mystery of his origin and the mystery of his end,&mdash;then
+      comes the great pageant of the winter solstice, then comes Christmas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differing but
+      always identical mortals?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was once the old pagan festival of dead Nature. It was once the old
+      pagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival when the
+      hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It was the pagan
+      festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants of an upper world
+      upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, and the production of a
+      race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is now the festival of the
+      Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortal children. It is now the
+      new festival of man&rsquo;s remembrance of his errors and his charity toward
+      erring neighbors. It has latterly become the widening festival of
+      universal brotherhood with succor for all need and nighness to all
+      suffering; of good will warring against ill will and of peace warring upon
+      war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the
+      festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it is on
+      the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an age to many
+      people&mdash;the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen; setting forth
+      man&rsquo;s pathetic love of youth&mdash;of his own youth that will not stay
+      with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds its ancient way
+      upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country a few
+      years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the desk
+      near his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing and turned
+      the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of his mental
+      travels&mdash;for such he followed&mdash;was now passing through the
+      evergreens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned there
+      like short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths and
+      customs of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper, as
+      gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the large one. It
+      dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the class of those
+      that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which possess them as
+      unsafe reading for unsafe minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sheets of paper covered with the man&rsquo;s clear, deliberate handwriting lay
+      thickly on the desk. A table in the centre of the room was strewn with
+      volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On the tops of
+      two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representing scenes from
+      the oldest known art of the East. These and other prints hanging about the
+      walls, however remote from each other in the times and places where they
+      had been gathered, brought together in this room of a quiet Kentucky
+      farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object: the subject related in
+      general to trees and in especial evergreens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to be submerged.
+      His left hand was always going out to one or the other of three
+      picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two of these frames held photographs of four young children&mdash;a boy
+      and a girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being well
+      enough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unruly and
+      disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of them looked
+      straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American frankness and good
+      humor; all had mouths shut tight with American energy and determination.
+      Apparently they already believed that the New World was behind them, that
+      the nation backed them up. In a way you believed it. You accepted them on
+      the spot as embodying that marvellous precocity in American children,
+      through which they early in life become conscious of the country and claim
+      it their country and believe that it claims them. Thus they took on the
+      distinction of being a squad detached only photographically from the rank
+      and file of the white armies of the young in the New World, millions and
+      millions strong, as they march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous,
+      magnificent, toward new times and new destinies for the nation and for
+      humanity&mdash;a kinder knowledge of man and a kinder ignorance of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third frame held the picture of a woman probably thirty years of age.
+      Her features were without noticeable American characteristics. What human
+      traits you saw depended upon what human traits you saw with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hair was dark and abundant, the brows dark and strong. And the lashes
+      were dark and strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornily hedged about,
+      somehow brought up before you a picture of autumn thistles&mdash;thistles
+      that look out from the shadow of a rock. They had a veritable thistle
+      quality and suggestiveness: gray and of the fields, sure of their
+      experience in nature, freighted with silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Despite grayness and thorniness, however, you saw that they were in the
+      summer of their life-bloom; and singularly above even their beauty of
+      blooming they held what is rare in the eyes of either men or women&mdash;they
+      held a look of being just.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole face was an oval, long, regular, high-bred. If the lower part
+      had been hidden behind a white veil of the Orient (by that little bank of
+      snow which is guardedly built in front of the overflowing desires of the
+      mouth), the upper part would have given the impression of reserve,
+      coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that one look&mdash;the
+      garnered wisdom, the tempering justice, of the eyes. The whole face being
+      seen, the lower features altered the impression made by the upper ones;
+      reserve became bettered into strength, coldness bettered into dignity,
+      severity of intellect transfused into glowing nobleness of character. The
+      look of virgin justice in her was perhaps what had survived from that
+      white light of life which falls upon young children as from a receding sun
+      and touches lingeringly their smiles and glances; but her mouth had
+      gathered its shadowy tenderness as she walked the furrows of the years,
+      watching their changeful harvests, eating their passing bread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A handful of some of the green things of winter lay before her picture:
+      holly boughs with their bold, upright red berries; a spray of the cedar of
+      the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous blue. When he had come in
+      from out of doors to go on with his work, he had put them there&mdash;perhaps
+      as some tribute. After all his years with her, many and strong, he must
+      have acquired various tributes and interpretations; but to-day, during his
+      walk in the woods, it had befallen him to think of her as holly which
+      ripens amid snows and retains its brave freshness on a landscape of
+      departed things. As cedar also which everywhere on the Shield is the best
+      loved of forest-growths to be the companion of household walls; so that
+      even the poorest of the people, if it does not grow near the spot they
+      build in, hunt for it and bring it home: everywhere wife and cedar, wife
+      and cedar, wife and cedar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The photographs of the children grouped on each side of hers with heads a
+      little lower down called up memories of Old World pictures in which
+      cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet of the heavenly Hebrew maid.
+      Glowing young American mother with four healthy children as her gifts to
+      the nation&mdash;this was the practical thought of her that riveted and
+      held.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has been said, they were in two groups, the children; a boy and girl in
+      each. The four were of nearly the same age; but the faces of two were on a
+      dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced at her again and persuaded
+      yourself that the expression of motherhood which characterized her
+      separated into two expressions (as behind a thin white cloud it is
+      possible to watch another cloud of darker hue). Nearer in time was the
+      countenance of a mother happy with happy offspring; further away the same
+      countenance withdrawn a little into shadow&mdash;the face of the mother
+      bereaved&mdash;mute and changeless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man, the worker, whom this little flock of wife and two surviving
+      children now followed through the world as their leader, sat with his face
+      toward his desk In a corner of the room; solidly squared before his
+      undertaking, liking it, mastering it; seldom changing his position as the
+      minutes passed, never nervously; with a quietude in him that was oftener
+      in Southern gentlemen in quieter, more gentlemanly times. A low powerful
+      figure with a pair of thick shoulders and tremendous limbs; filling the
+      room with his vitality as a heavy passionate animal lying in a corner of a
+      cage fills the space of the cage, so that you wait for it to roll over or
+      get up on its feet and walk about that you may study its markings and get
+      an inkling of its conquering nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime there were hints of him. When he had come in, he had thrown his
+      overcoat on a chair that stood near the table in the centre of the room
+      and had dropped his hat upon his coat. It had slipped to the floor and now
+      lay there&mdash;a low, soft black hat of a kind formerly much worn by
+      young Southerners of the countryside,&mdash;especially on occasions when
+      there was a spur of heat in their mood and going,&mdash;much the same kind
+      that one sees on the heads of students in Rome in winter; light, warm,
+      shaping itself readily to breezes from any quarter, to be doffed or donned
+      as comfortable and negligible. It suggested that he had been a country boy
+      in the land, still belonged to the land, and as a man kept to its
+      out-of-door habits and fashions. His shoes, one of which you saw at each
+      side of his chair, were especially well made for rough-going feet to tramp
+      in during all weathers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped to withdraw your
+      interpretation of him from farm life to the arts or the professions. The
+      scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing against the clear-hued flesh
+      at the back of his neck, and the Van Dyck-like edge of the shirt cuff,
+      defining his powerful wrist and hand, strengthened the notion that he
+      belonged to the arts or to the professions. He might have been sitting
+      before a canvas instead of a desk and holding a brush instead of a pen:
+      the picture would have been true to life. Or truer yet, he might have
+      taken his place with the grave group of students in the Lesson in Anatomy
+      left by Rembrandt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair about, and began to read the
+      page he had just finished: then you saw him. He had a big, masculine,
+      solid-cut, self-respecting, normal-looking, executive head&mdash;covered
+      with thick yellowish hair clipped short; so that while everything else in
+      his appearance indicated that he was in the prime of manhood, the clipped
+      hair caused him to appear still more youthful; and it invested him with a
+      rustic atmosphere which went along very naturally with the sentimental
+      country hat and the all-weather shoes. He seemed at first impression a
+      magnificent animal frankly loved of the sun&mdash;perhaps too warmly. The
+      sun itself seemed to have colored for him his beard and mustache&mdash;a
+      characteristic hue of men&rsquo;s hair and beard in this land peopled from Old
+      English stock. The beard, like the hair, was cut short, as though his idea
+      might have been to get both hair and beard out of life&rsquo;s daily way; but
+      his mustache curled thickly down over his mouth, hiding it. In the whole
+      effect there was a suggestion of the Continent, perhaps of a former
+      student career in Germany, memories of which may still have lasted with
+      him and the marks of which may have purposely been kept up in his
+      appearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But such a fashion of beard, while covering a man&rsquo;s face, does much to
+      uncover the man. As he sat amid his papers and books, your thought surely
+      led again to old pictures where earnest heads bend together over some
+      point on the human road, at which knowledge widens and suffering begins to
+      be made more bearable and death more kind. Perforce now you interpreted
+      him and fixed his general working category: that he was absorbed in work
+      meant to be serviceable to humanity. His house, the members of his family,
+      the people of his neighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere
+      dweller on his farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the
+      race forever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped its
+      responsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests. The
+      look of the student left his face; over it began to play the soft lights
+      of the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for his own place
+      in the world; the student had become the husband and house-father. A few
+      moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his work again, his right hand
+      took up the pen, his left hand went back to the pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he were being
+      watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed. (He had the
+      reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that he is idolized.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immense oak
+      tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminder of
+      vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, the straining
+      and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcries for the wild
+      life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, an image of forest
+      reflection. Once a small black-and-white sapsucker, circling the trunk and
+      peering into the crevices of the bark on a level with the windows, uttered
+      minute notes which penetrated into the room like steel darts of sound. A
+      snowbird alighted on the window-sill, glanced familiarly in at the man,
+      and shot up its crest; but disappointed perhaps that it was not noticed,
+      quoted its resigned gray phrase&mdash;a phrase it had made for itself to
+      accompany the score of gray whiter&mdash;and flitted on billowy wings to a
+      juniper at the corner of the house, its turret against the long javelins
+      of the North.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amid the stillness of Nature outside and the house-silence of a love
+      guarding him within, the man worked on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little clock ticked independently on the old-fashioned Parian marble
+      mantelpiece. Prints were propped against its sides and face, illustrating
+      the use of trees about ancient tombs and temples. Out of this photographic
+      grove of dead things the uncaring clock threw out upon the air a living
+      three&mdash;the fateful three that had been measured for each tomb and
+      temple in its own land and time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A knock, regretful but positive, was heard, and the door opening into the
+      hall was quietly pushed open. A glow lit up the student&rsquo;s face though he
+      did not stop writing; and his voice, while it gave a welcome,
+      unconsciously expressed regret at being disturbed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his heavy figure with instant courtesy&mdash;rather obsolete now&mdash;and
+      bowing to one side, sat down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I see,&rdquo; he said, dipping his pen into his ink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since you did not turn around, you would better have said &lsquo;So I hear.&rsquo; It
+      is three o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said you would be ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said you would be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am done&mdash;nearly done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How nearly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By to-morrow&mdash;to-morrow afternoon before dark. I have reached the
+      end, but now it is hard to stop, hard to let go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His tone gave first place, primary consideration, to his work. The silence
+      in the room suddenly became charged. When the voice was heard again, there
+      was constraint in it:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something to be done this afternoon before dark, something I
+      have a share in. Having a share, I am interested. Being interested, I am
+      prompt. Being prompt, I am here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waved his hand over the written sheets before him&mdash;those cold Alps
+      of learning; and asked reproachfully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you not interested in all this, O you of little faith?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I say, O me of little knowledge!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the words impulsively escaped, he heard a quick movement behind him. He
+      widened out his heavy arms upon his manuscript and looked back over his
+      shoulder at her and laughed. And still smiling and holding his pen between
+      his fingers, he turned and faced her. She had advanced into the middle of
+      the room and had stopped at the chair on which he had thrown his overcoat
+      and hat. She had picked up the hat and stood turning it and pushing its
+      soft material back into shape for his head&mdash;without looking at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The northern light of the winter afternoon, entering through the looped
+      crimson-damask curtains, fell sidewise upon the woman of the picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Years had passed since the picture had been made. There were changes in
+      her; she looked younger. She had effaced the ravages of a sadder period of
+      her life as human voyagers upon reaching quiet port repair the damages of
+      wandering and storm. Even the look of motherhood, of the two motherhoods,
+      which so characterized her in the photograph, had disappeared for the
+      present. Seeing her now for the first time, one would have said that her
+      whole mood and bearing made a single declaration: she was neither wife nor
+      mother; she was a woman in love with life&rsquo;s youth&mdash;with youth&mdash;youth;
+      in love with the things that youth alone could ever secure to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carriage of her beautiful head, brave and buoyant, brought before you
+      a vision of growing things in nature as they move towards their summer yet
+      far away. There still was youth in the round white throat above the collar
+      of green velvet&mdash;woodland green&mdash;darker than the green of the
+      cloth she wore. You were glad she had chosen that color because she was
+      going for a walk with him; and green would enchain the eye out on the sere
+      ground and under the stripped trees. The flecklessness of her long gloves
+      drew your thoughts to winter rather&mdash;to its one beauteous gift
+      dropped from soiled clouds. A slender toque brought out the keenness in
+      the oval of her face. From it rose one backward-sweeping feather of green
+      shaded to coral at the tip; and there your fancy may have cared to see
+      lingering the last radiance of whiter-sunset skies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept his seat with his back to the manuscript from which he had
+      repulsed her; and his eyes swept loyally over her as she waited. Though
+      she could scarcely trust herself to speak, still less could she endure the
+      silence. With her face turned toward the windows opening on the lawn, she
+      stretched out her arm toward him and softly shook his hat at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sun sets&mdash;you remember how many minutes after four,&rdquo; she said,
+      with no other tone than that of quiet warning. &ldquo;I marked the minutes in
+      the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone to bed, so
+      that you would not forget. You know how short the twilights are even when
+      the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will not be any twilight.
+      The children said they would not be at home until after dark, but they may
+      come sooner; it may be a trick. They have threatened to catch us this year
+      in one way or another, and you know they must not do that&mdash;not this
+      year! There must be one more Christmas with all its old ways&mdash;even if
+      it must be without its old mysteries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not reply at once and then not relevantly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard you playing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under his
+      brows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for she held
+      her face averted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater
+      constraint in her voice when it was next heard:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to play; you need not have listened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to listen; you played loud&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown other
+      sounds,&rdquo; she admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What other sounds?&rdquo; His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it was a
+      frank thrust into the unknown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Discords&mdash;possibly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What discords?&rdquo; His thrust became deeper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across her
+      lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hidden
+      trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished,
+      radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a blaze of
+      sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the advancing Figure
+      of Joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the whole familiar picture of him now&mdash;triumphantly painted in
+      the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords&mdash;that
+      drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the
+      self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near losing;
+      and her words issued from behind the closed gates&mdash;as through a
+      crevice of the closed gates:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep
+      grave ones you sent for. It is written by a deep grave German, and it is
+      worked out in the deep grave German way. The whole purpose of it is to
+      show that any woman in the life of any man is merely&mdash;an Incident.
+      She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a briefer time, for a
+      greater time; but all along and in the end, at bottom, she is to him&mdash;an
+      Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were those the discords?&rdquo; he asked gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised his
+      arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of magazines
+      on top of his desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a work,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;not written by a German or by any other man,
+      but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole purpose
+      of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the life of any
+      woman. He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for a briefer time,
+      for a greater time; but all along and in the end, beneath everything else,
+      he is to her&mdash;an Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That did not trouble me,&rdquo; he said tenderly. &ldquo;Those were not discords to
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no
+      comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to
+      whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he
+      turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself
+      from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a year now I
+      have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and at this work&mdash;without
+      any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurred before in our lives.
+      You have shared everything. I have relied upon you and I have needed you,
+      and you have never failed me. And this apparently has been your reward&mdash;to
+      be rudely shut out at last. Now you come in and I tell you that the work
+      is done&mdash;quite finished&mdash;without a word to you about it. Do I
+      not understand?&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;Have I not understood all along? It is
+      true; outwardly as regards this work you have been&mdash;the Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he paused, she made a slight gesture with one hand as though she did
+      not care for what he was saying and brushed away the fragile web of his
+      words from before her eyes&mdash;eyes fixed on larger things lying clear
+      before her in life&rsquo;s distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, comrade of all these years, battler with me for life&rsquo;s victories,
+      did you think you were never to know? Did you believe I was never to
+      explain? You had only one more day to wait! If patience, if faith, could
+      only have lasted another twenty-four hours&mdash;until Christmas Eve!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first time for nearly a year that the sound of those words had
+      been heard in that house. He bent earnestly over toward her; he leaned
+      heavily forward with his hands on his knees and searched her features with
+      loyal chiding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;its secrets for you and
+      me? Think of Christmas Eve for you and me! Remember!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a woodchopper&rsquo;s
+      smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about the hidden
+      life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmosphere near by is
+      clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender haze of old
+      pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noted the effect of his words and did not wait. He turned to his desk
+      and, gathering up the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to cover her
+      picture with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay blinded and bewildered there,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;until the hour comes when
+      holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand; you will
+      then see whether in this work you have been&mdash;the Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter afternoon
+      had perceptibly waned in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were
+      tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up
+      between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is getting late,&rdquo; she said in nearly the same tone of quiet warning
+      with which she had spoken before. &ldquo;There is no time to lose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its interrupted
+      work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of her arms, looking
+      at her reverently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides&mdash;the
+      hands that were life, the arms that were love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward over
+      his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache. Then,
+      closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly on his head
+      and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put out one of her
+      hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile over her shoulder
+      to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?&rdquo; she asked,
+      with a struggling sweetness in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve
+      with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the collar:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The trouble is,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;the trouble is that the authors are right
+      and the books are right: men and women <i>are</i> only Incidents to each
+      other in life,&rdquo; and she passed out into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the universe,&rdquo;
+       he replied, &ldquo;if we cared to look at it in that way; but we&rsquo;d better not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly
+      stopped buttoning his overcoat. His eyes began to wander over the books,
+      the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey everything that he
+      had brought together from such distances of place and time. His work was
+      in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of loneliness, came over him as
+      it comes upon all of us who reach the happy ending of toil that we have
+      put our heart and strength in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you coming?&rdquo; she called faintly from the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am coming,&rdquo; he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he stopped
+      again and looked back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was on
+      the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers who
+      join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment that
+      through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which men&mdash;like a
+      crew of sailors&mdash;tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow her into some
+      divine haven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His task was ended. Would it be of service? Would it carry any message?
+      Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth, with the eyes
+      of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable children of the
+      future the better for its shining?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you coming?&rdquo; she called more quiveringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am coming,&rdquo; he called back, breaking away from his revery, and raising
+      his voice so it would surely reach her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the short
+      frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting to be
+      joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed on the
+      doorway for his emerging figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-morrow night,&rdquo; he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his
+      words, &ldquo;to-morrow night you will understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers, &ldquo;to-morrow
+      night I must understand. Until to-morrow night, then, blinded and
+      bewildered with holly and cedar let me be! Kind ignorance, enfold me and
+      spare me! All happiness that I can control or conjecture, come to me and
+      console me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he should
+      step forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what they
+      had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind, and the
+      whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no movement.
+      Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the winter land;
+      it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and beyond
+      the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the distance you
+      distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-grass pastures: white ash
+      and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut and black walnut; and
+      the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the sycamore with her soft
+      leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the hickory brought to mind autumn
+      days when children were abroad, ploughing the myriad leaves with booted
+      feet and gathering their harvest of nuts&mdash;primitive food-storing
+      instinct of the human animal still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts
+      to be put away in garret and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas
+      came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of an
+      axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it would
+      bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of the forest
+      mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be gathering the
+      mistletoe to decorate the house. Near by was a thicket of bramble and cane
+      where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly thrived: the same fingers
+      would be gathering that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had just been
+      shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears ready for
+      the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly to remembrance
+      the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a genial torrent
+      through all days and nights of the year&mdash;many a full-throated rill&mdash;but
+      never with so inundating a movement as at this season. And the same grain
+      suggested also the smokehouses of all farms, in which larded porkers,
+      fattened by it, had taken on posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in
+      which up under the black rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to
+      their needed flavor over well-chosen chips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled,
+      rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble of
+      which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness for the
+      table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the drills at
+      harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn aftermath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where hemp-breakers
+      were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks wagons loaded with
+      the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to the towns, helping to
+      fill the farmer&rsquo;s pockets with holiday largess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the mistletoe&mdash;the
+      holly&mdash;the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty men&mdash;the
+      hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives&mdash;the turkey and the
+      quail&mdash;and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sight there&mdash;the
+      fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into offerings to the
+      dark solstice, the low activities of the soil uplifted to human joyance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One last thing completed the picture of the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day and
+      lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive verdure.
+      Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor larch nor fir is
+      native to these portions of the Shield; only the wild cedar, the shapeless
+      and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage of evergreens was not,
+      then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had been planted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their note of
+      deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape this
+      dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky they waited in
+      beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and spruce which seems always
+      to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; the dim blue-gray of pines
+      which rather belongs to far-vaulted summer skies; and the dark green of
+      firs&mdash;true comfortable winter coat when snows sift mournfully and
+      icicles are spearing earthward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished the
+      picture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied no
+      appetite, they were ministers to no passions; but with them the Christmas
+      of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape their boughs with its
+      gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires the spiritual hope of
+      humanity would take its flight toward the eternal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus then the winter land waited for the oncoming of that strange
+      travelling festival of the world which has roved into it and encamped
+      gypsy-like from old lost countries: the festival that takes toll of field
+      and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup and loaf; but that, best of all, wrings
+      from the nature of man its reluctant tenderness for his fellows and builds
+      out of his lonely doubts regarding this life his faith in a better one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And central on this whole silent scene&mdash;the highest element in it&mdash;its
+      one winter-red passion flower&mdash;the motionless woman waiting outside
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he came out upon the step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though his first thought were of
+      what the weather was going to be. Then as he buttoned the top button of
+      his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down over it to make it more
+      comfortable under his short neck, with his other hand he gave a little
+      pull at his hat&mdash;the romantic country hat; and he peeped out from
+      under the rustic brim at her, smiling with old gayeties and old
+      fondnesses. He bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked so short
+      under the flat headgear that her first thought was how slight a disguise
+      every year turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and she smiled back
+      at him with the same gayeties and fondnesses of days gone by. But such a
+      deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and walked hurriedly down the
+      hill toward the evergreens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was quickly at her side. She could feel how animal youth in him
+      released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was brutal
+      vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as his
+      overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping out of
+      life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down the lawn he
+      halted and laid his hand heavily on her wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to that!&rdquo; he said. His voice was eager, excited, like a boy&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the opposite side of the house, several hundred yards away, the country
+      turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them the rumbling of many
+      vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of the nearest town and moving
+      toward smaller villages scattered over the country; to its hamlets and
+      cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer or poorer&mdash;every vehicle
+      Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of the Southern Yule-tide. There were
+      matters and usages in those American carriages and buggies and wagons and
+      carts the history of which went back to the England of the Georges and the
+      Stuarts and the Henrys; to the England of Elizabeth, to the England of
+      Chaucer; back through robuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred,
+      and on beyond this till they were lost under the forest glooms of
+      Druidical Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood looking into each other&rsquo;s eyes and gathering into their ears
+      the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it all meant&mdash;this
+      far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they saw the whole
+      picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: the atmosphere of
+      it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouring from its chimneys,
+      so that twilight in it had already begun to fall ahead of twilight out in
+      the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along the little streets, and shops
+      to be illuminated to the delight of window-gazing, mystery-loving children&mdash;wild
+      with their holiday excitements and secrecies. Somewhere in the throng
+      their own two children were busy unless they had already started home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For years he had held a professorship in the college in this town, driving
+      in and out from his home; but with the close of this academic year he was
+      to join the slender file of Southern men who have been called to Northern
+      universities: this change would mean the end of life here. Both thought of
+      this now&mdash;of the last Christmas in the house; and with the same
+      impulse they turned their gaze back to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield, a
+      writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its
+      meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of an
+      entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue, he, the
+      song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into the notes of
+      a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world knows it&mdash;the
+      only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of American home life&mdash;embodying
+      the very soul of it in the clear amber of sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low,
+      old-fashioned, brown-walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneys generous,
+      with green window-shutters less than green and white window-sills less
+      than white; with feudal vines giving to its walls their summery
+      allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in the middle years of its
+      strength and its honors; not needy, not wealthy, but answering Agar&rsquo;s
+      prayer for neither poverty nor riches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been the house of his fathers. He had brought her to it as his own
+      on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across the country.
+      They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him in the carriage,
+      one of his arms around her and his other hand enfolding both of hers, she
+      had first caught sight of it through the forest trees&mdash;waiting for
+      her with its lights just lit, its warmth, its privacies: and that had been
+      Christmas Eve!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For her wedding day had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her
+      choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she had
+      clung to it the more positively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the most beautiful night of the year!&rdquo; she had replied, brushing
+      their objection aside with that reason alone. &ldquo;And it is the happiest! I
+      will be married on that night, when I am happiest!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered other words to herself&mdash;yet
+      scarce uttered them, rather felt them:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannot fail us
+      became human. My love for him, which is the divine thing in my life and
+      which is never to fail him, shall become human to him on that night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the carriage had stopped at the front porch, he had led her into the
+      house between the proud smiling servants of his establishment ranged at a
+      respectful distance on each side; and without surrendering her even to her
+      maid&mdash;a new spirit of silence on him&mdash;he had led her to her
+      bedroom, to a place on the carpet under the chandelier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in her
+      youth and loveliness&mdash;<i>for him;</i> come into his house, into his
+      arms&mdash;<i>his</i>; no other&rsquo;s&mdash;never while life lasted to be
+      another&rsquo;s even in thought or in desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of many
+      had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could gather her
+      home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms and set upon
+      her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As his warm breath
+      broke close against her face, his lips under their mustache, almost boyish
+      then, had thoughtlessly formed one little phrase&mdash;one little but most
+      lasting and fateful phrase:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of mistletoe
+      swung from the chandelier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards
+      know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as the
+      first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them most
+      clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow down into
+      the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon the life-sap of
+      the tree. And in all the later years they had been the green spot of
+      verdure under life&rsquo;s dark skies&mdash;the undying bough into which the
+      spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the first problem of learning to weld her nature to his wisely;
+      through the perils of bearing children and the agony of seeing some of
+      them pass away; through the ambition of having him rise in his profession
+      and through the ideal of making his home an earthly paradise; through
+      loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he came back,&mdash;upon her
+      whole life had rested the wintry benediction of that mystical phrase:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned away now, starting once more downward toward the evergreens. He
+      was quickly at her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you suppose Harold and Elizabeth are up to about this time?&rdquo; he
+      asked, with a good-humored jerk of his head toward the distant town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At least to something mischievous, whatever it is,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;They
+      begged to be allowed to stay until the shop windows were lighted; they
+      have seen the shop windows two or three times already this week: there is
+      no great marvel for them now in shop windows. Permission to stay late may
+      be a blind to come home early. They are determined, from what I have
+      overheard, to put an end this year to the parental house mysteries of
+      Christmas. They are crossing the boundary between the first childhood and
+      the second. But if it be possible, I wish everything to be kept once more
+      just as it has always been; let it be so for my sake!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I wish it for your sake,&rdquo; he replied heartily; &ldquo;and for my purposes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment of silence he asked: &ldquo;How large a Tree must it be this
+      year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will have to be large,&rdquo; she replied; and she began to count those for
+      whom the Tree this year was meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First she called the names of the two children they had lost. Gifts for
+      these were every year hung on the boughs. She mentioned their names now,
+      and then she continued counting:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the family come
+      Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor&rsquo;s children. Then the
+      servants&mdash;long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow for the
+      other children who are to make up the Christmas party: ten children have
+      been invited, ten children have accepted, ten children will arrive. The
+      ten will bring with them some unimportant parents; you can judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will do for size,&rdquo; he said, laughing. &ldquo;Now the kind: spruce&mdash;larch&mdash;hemlock&mdash;pine&mdash;which
+      shall it be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It shall be none of them!&rdquo; she answered, after a little waiting. &ldquo;It
+      shall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeer are
+      harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts&mdash;fir. The old Christmas
+      stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in it longest. And deepest
+      mystery darkens the heart of it,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fir it shall be!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Choose the tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have chosen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped and delicately touched his wrist with the finger tips of one
+      white-gloved hand, bidding him stand beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That one,&rdquo; she said, pointing down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens in summer gratefully, but
+      now lying like a band of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near the
+      middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on this island,
+      aloof from its fellows and with space for the growth of its boughs, stood
+      a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering faultlessly,
+      star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered more years&mdash;a tame
+      dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurred with wildness and
+      lapped by low washings of the planet&rsquo;s primeval ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At each Christmas for several years they had been tempted to cut this
+      tree, but had spared it for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the
+      thicket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That one,&rdquo; she now said, pointing down. &ldquo;This is the last time. Let us
+      have the best of things while we may! Is it not always the perfect that is
+      demanded for sacrifice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His glance had already gone forward eagerly to the tree, and he started
+      toward it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Descending, they stepped across the brook to the island and went up close
+      to the fir. With a movement not unobserved by her he held out his hand and
+      clasped three green fingers of a low bough which the fir seemed to stretch
+      out to him recognizingly. (She had always realized the existence of some
+      intimate bond between him and the forest.) His face now filled with
+      meanings she did not share; the spell of the secret work had followed him
+      out of the house down to the trees; incommunicable silence shut him in. A
+      moment later his fingers parted with the green fingers of the fir and he
+      moved away from her side, starting around the tree and studying it as
+      though in delight of fresh knowledge. So she watched him pass around to
+      the other side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he came back where he had started, she was not there. He looked
+      around searchingly; her figure was nowhere in sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood&mdash;waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The valley had memories, what memories! The years came close together
+      here; they clustered as thickly as the trees themselves. Vacant spots
+      among them marked where the Christmas Trees of former years had been cut
+      down. Some of the Trees had been for the two children they had lost. This
+      wandering trail led hither and thither back to the first Tree for the
+      first child: he had stooped down and cut that close to the ground with his
+      mere penknife. When it had been lighted, it had held only two or three
+      candles; and the candle on the top of it had flared level into the
+      infant&rsquo;s hand-shaded eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew that she was making through the evergreens a Pilgrimage of the
+      Years, walking there softly and alone with the feet of life&rsquo;s Pities and a
+      mother&rsquo;s Constancies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited for her&mdash;motionless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley now. Only from the
+      trees came the plaintive twittering of birds which had come in from frozen
+      weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds of the boughs were calling to
+      one another. It was not their song, but their speech; there was no love in
+      it, but there was what for them perhaps corresponds to our sense of ties.
+      It most resembled in human life the brief things that two people, having
+      long lived together, utter to each other when together in a room they
+      prepare for the night: there is no anticipation; it is a confession of the
+      unconfessed. About him now sounded this low winter music from the far
+      boundary of other lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not hear it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light on the landscape had changed. The sun was setting and a splendor
+      began to spread along the sky and across the land. It laid a glory on the
+      roof of the house on the hill; it smote the edge of the woodland pasture,
+      burnishing with copper the gray domes; it shone faintly on distant corn
+      shocks, on the weather-dark tents of the hemp at bivouac soldierly and
+      grim. At his feet it sparkled in rose gleams on the samite of the brook
+      and threw burning shafts into the gloom of the fir beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not hear the calling of the birds about his ears, he did not see
+      the sunset before his eyes, he did not feel the fir tree the boughs of
+      which stuck against his side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood there as still as a rock&mdash;with his secret. Not the secret of
+      the year&rsquo;s work, which was to be divulged to his wife and through her to
+      the world; but the secret which for some years had been growing in his
+      life and which would, he hoped, never grow into the open&mdash;to be seen
+      of her and of all men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sentimental country hat now looked as though it might have been worn
+      purposely to help out a disguise, as the more troubled man behind the
+      scenes makes up to be the happier clown. It became an absurdity, a
+      mockery, above his face grave, stern, set of jaw and eye. He was no longer
+      the student buried among his books nor human brother to toiling brothers.
+      He had not the slightest thought of service to mankind left in him, he was
+      but a man himself with enough to think of in the battle between his own
+      will and blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And behind him among the dark evergreens went on that Pilgrimage of the
+      Years&mdash;with the feet of the Pities and the Constancies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moments passed; he did not stir. Then there was a slight noise on the
+      other side of the tree, and his nature instantly stepped back into his
+      outward place. He looked through the boughs. She had returned and was
+      standing with her face also turned toward the sunset; it was very pale,
+      very still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such darkness had settled on the valley now that the green she wore blent
+      with the green of the fir. He saw only her white face and her white hands
+      so close to the branches that they appeared to rest upon them, to grow out
+      of them: he sadly thought of one of his prints of Egypt of old and of the
+      Lady of the Sacred Tree. Her long backward-sweeping plume of green also
+      blent with the green of the fir&mdash;shade to shade&mdash;and only the
+      coral tip of it remained strongly visible. This matched the last coral in
+      the sunset; and it seemed to rest ominously above her head as a
+      finger-point of the fading light of Nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went quickly around to her. He locked his arms around her and drew her
+      close and held her close; and thus for a while the two stood, watching the
+      flame on the altar of the world as it sank lower, leaving emptiness and
+      ashes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once she put out a hand and with a gesture full of majesty and nobleness
+      waved farewell to the dying fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still without a word he took his arms from around her and turned
+      energetically to the tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pressed the lowest boughs aside and made his way in close to the trunk
+      and struck it with a keen stroke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fir as he drew the axe out made at its gashed throat a sound like that
+      of a butchered, blood-strangled creature trying to cry out too late
+      against a treachery. A horror ran through the boughs; the thousands of
+      leaves were jarred by the death-strokes; and the top of it rocked like a
+      splendid plume too rudely treated in a storm. Then it fell over on its
+      side, bridging blackly the white ice of the brook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stooping, he lifted it triumphantly. He set the butt-end on one of his
+      shoulders and, stretching his arms up, grasped the trunk and held the tree
+      straight in the air, so that it seemed to be growing out of his big
+      shoulder as out of a ledge of rock. Then he turned to her and laughed out
+      in his strength and youth. She laughed joyously back at him, glorying as
+      he did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a robust re-shouldering of the tree to make it more comfortable to
+      carry, he turned and started up the hill toward the house. As she followed
+      behind, the old mystery of the woods seemed at last to have taken bodily
+      possession of him. The fir was riding on his shoulder, its arms met fondly
+      around his neck, its fingers were caressing his hair. And it whispered
+      back jeeringly to her through the twilight:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say farewell to him! He was once yours; he is yours no longer. He dandles
+      the child of the forest on his shoulder instead of his children by you in
+      the house. He belongs to Nature; and as Nature calls, he will always
+      follow&mdash;though it should lead over the precipice or into the flood.
+      Once Nature called him to you: remember how he broke down barriers until
+      he won you. Now he is yours no longer&mdash;say good-by to him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With an imbued terror and desolation, she caught up with him. By a
+      movement so soft that he should not be aware, she plucked him by the coat
+      sleeve on the other side from the fir and held on to him as he strode on
+      in careless joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Halfway up the hill lights began to flash from the windows of the house: a
+      servant was bringing in the lamps. It was at this hour, in just this way,
+      that she had first caught sight of them on that Christmas Eve when he had
+      brought her home after the wedding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hurried around in front of him, wishing to read the expression of his
+      eyes by the distant gleams from the windows. Would they have nothing to
+      say to her about those winter twilight lamps? Did he, too, not remember?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His head and face were hidden; a thousand small spears of Nature bristled
+      between him and her; but he laughed out to her from behind the rampart of
+      the green spears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment a low sound in the distance drew her attention, and
+      instantly alert she paused to listen. Then, forgetting everything else,
+      she called to him with a rush of laughter like that of her mischief-loving
+      girlhood:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick! There they are! I heard the gate shut at the turnpike! They must
+      not catch us! Quick! Quick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurry, then!&rdquo; he cried, as he ran forward, joining his laughter to hers.
+      &ldquo;Open the door for me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After this the night fell fast. The only sounds to be heard in the valley
+      were the minute readjustments of the ice of the brook as it froze tighter
+      and the distressed cries of the birds that had roosted in the fir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the Tree entered the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      During the night it turned bitter cold. When morning came the sky was a
+      turquoise and the wind a gale. The sun seemed to give out light but not
+      heat&mdash;to lavish its splendor but withhold its charity. Moist flesh if
+      it chanced to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter land the
+      tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece of greased metal used as a trap
+      and is caught and held there until the trapper returns or until it starves&mdash;starves
+      with food on its tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farmhand struck it, resisted as
+      rock. In the fetlocks of farm horses, as they moved shivering, balls of
+      ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little roughnesses of woodland paths
+      snapped off beneath the slow-searching hoofs of fodder-seeking cattle like
+      points of glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within their wool the sheep were comforted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On higher fields which had given back their moisture to the atmosphere and
+      now were dry, the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals and dragged
+      it away in flaunting yellow veils. The picture it made, being so
+      ill-seasoned, led you to think of August drought when the grasshopper
+      stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is hot in the nostrils
+      and every bird holds its beak open and its wings lifted like cooling
+      lattices alongside its breast. In these veils of dust swarms of frost
+      crystals sported&mdash;dead midgets of the dead North. Except crystal and
+      dust and wind, naught moved out there; no field mouse, no hare nor lark
+      nor little shielded dove. In the naked trees of the pasture the crow kept
+      his beak as unseen as the owl&rsquo;s; about the cedars of the yard no scarlet
+      feather warmed the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house on the hill&mdash;one of the houses whose spirit had been blown
+      into the amber of the poet&rsquo;s song&mdash;sent festal smoke out of its
+      chimneys all day long. At intervals the radiant faces of children appeared
+      at the windows, hanging wreaths of evergreens; or their figures flitted to
+      and fro within as they wove garlands on the walls for the Christmas party.
+      At intervals some servant with head and shoulders muffled in a
+      bright-colored shawl darted trippingly from the house to the cabins in the
+      yard and from the cabins back to the house&mdash;the tropical African&rsquo;s
+      polar dance between fire and fire. By every sign it gave the house showed
+      that it was marshalling its whole happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing only seemed to make a signal of distress from afar. The oak tree
+      beside the house, whose roots coiled warmly under the hearth-stones and
+      whose boughs were outstretched across the roof, seemed to writhe and rock
+      in its winter sleep with murmurings and tossings like a human dreamer
+      trying to get rid of an unhappy dream. Imagination might have said that
+      some darkest tragedy of forests long since gone still lived in this lone
+      survivor&mdash;that it struggled to give up the grief and guilt of an
+      ancient forest shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather moderated in the afternoon. A warm current swept across the
+      upper atmosphere, developing everywhere behind it a cloud; and toward
+      sundown out of this cloud down upon the Shield snow began to fall. Not the
+      large wet flakes which sometimes descend too late in spring upon the buds
+      of apple orchards; nor those mournfuller ones which drop too soon on dim
+      wild violets in November woods, but winter snow, stern sculptor of Arctic
+      solitudes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all over the Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Softly the snow fell upon the year&rsquo;s footprints and pathways of children
+      and upon schoolhouses now closed and riotously deserted. More softly upon
+      too crowded asylums for them: houses of noonday darkness where eyes
+      eagerly look out at the windows but do not see; houses of soundlessness
+      where ears listen and do not hear any noise; houses of silence where lips
+      try to speak but utter no word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The snow of Christmas Eve was falling softly on the old: whose eyes are
+      always seeing vanished faces, whose ears hear voices gentler than any the
+      earth now knows, whose hands forever try to reach other hands vainly held
+      out to them. Sad, sad to those who remember loved ones gone with their
+      kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But sadder yet for those who live on together after kindnesses have
+      ceased, or whose love went like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve to
+      them! Dark its snow and blinding!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a shaded lamp&mdash;the
+      only light in the room. Her face, always calm in life&rsquo;s wisdom, but
+      agitated now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in toward her,
+      rested clear-cut upon the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She placed the lamp on a table near the door and seated herself beside it.
+      But she pushed the lamp away unconsciously as though the light of the
+      house were no longer her light; and she sat in the chair as though it were
+      no longer her chair; and she looked about the room as though it were no
+      longer hers nor the house itself nor anything else that she cared for
+      most.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Earlier in the evening they had finished hanging the presents on the Tree;
+      but then an interruption had followed: the children had broken profanely
+      in upon them, rending the veil of the house mysteries; and for more than
+      an hour the night had been given up to them. Now the children were asleep
+      upstairs, already dreaming of Christmas Morn and the rush for the
+      stockings. The servants had finished their work and were gone to their
+      quarters out in the yard. The doors of the house were locked. There would
+      be no more intrusion now, no possible interruption; all the years were to
+      meet him and her&mdash;alone. For Life is the master dramatist: when its
+      hidden tragedies are ready to utter themselves, everything superfluous
+      quits the stage; it is the essential two who fill it! And how little the
+      rest of the world ever hears of what takes place between the two!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little while before he had left the room with the step-ladder; when he
+      came back, he was to bring with him the manuscript&mdash;the silent
+      snowfall of knowledge which had been deepening about him for a year. The
+      time had already passed for him to return, but he did not come. Was there
+      anything in the forecast of the night that made him falter? Was he
+      shrinking&mdash;<i>him</i> shrink? She put away the thought as a strange
+      outbreak of injustice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How still it was outside the house with the snow falling! How still
+      within! She began to hear the ticking of the tranquil old clock under the
+      stairway out in the hall&mdash;always tranquil, always tranquil. And then
+      she began to listen to the disordered strokes of her own heart&mdash;that
+      red Clock in the body&rsquo;s Tower whose beats are sent outward along the
+      streets and alleys of the blood; whose law it is to be alternately wound
+      too fast by the fingers of Joy, too slow by the fingers of Sorrow; and
+      whose fate, if it once run down, never afterwards either by Joy or Sorrow
+      to be made to run again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last she could hear the distant door of his study open and close and
+      his steps advance along the hall. With what a splendid swing and tramp he
+      brought himself toward her!&mdash;with what self-unconsciousness and
+      virile strength in his feet! His steps entered and crossed his bedroom,
+      entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he stood there before her in the
+      parlor doorway, a few yards off&mdash;stopped and regarded her intently,
+      smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment she realized what had delayed him. When he had gone away with
+      the step-ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behind locked doors,
+      he had been working all the afternoon at the decorations of the Tree. Now
+      he came back ceremoniously dressed; the rest of the night was to be in her
+      honor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had always been so on this anniversary of their bridal night. They had
+      always dressed for it; the children now in their graves had been dressed
+      for it; the children in bed upstairs were regularly dressed for it; the
+      house was dressed for it; the servants were dressed for it; the whole life
+      of that establishment had always been made to feel by honors and
+      tendernesses and gayeties that this was the night on which he had married
+      her and brought her home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as never before how these
+      anniversaries had not taken his youth away, but had added youth to him; he
+      had grown like the evergreen in the middle of the room&mdash;with increase
+      of trunk and limbs and with larger tides of strength surging through him
+      toward the master sun. There were no ravages of married life in him. Time
+      had merely made the tree more of a tree and made his youth more youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took in momentary details of his appearance: a moisture like summer
+      heat along the edge of his yellow hair, started by the bath into which he
+      had plunged; the freshness of the enormous hands holding the manuscript;
+      the muscle of the forearm bulging within the dress-coat sleeve. Many a
+      time she had wondered how so perfect an animal as he had ever climbed to
+      such an elevation of work; and then had wondered again whether any but
+      such an animal ever in life does so climb&mdash;shouldering along with him
+      the poise and breadth of health and causing the hot sun of the valley to
+      shine on the mountain tops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed in her honor, thus but
+      the larger youth after all their years together, would return her greeting
+      with a light in his eyes that had always made them so beautiful to her&mdash;a
+      light burning as at a portal opening inward for her only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes rested on his manuscript.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He brought it wrapped and tied in the true holiday spirit&mdash;sprigs of
+      cedar and holly caught in the ribands; and he now lifted and held it out
+      to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems. Then he stepped
+      forward and put it on the table at her elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you!&rdquo; he said reverently, stepping back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been years when, returning from a tramp across the country, he
+      would bring her perhaps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or a brilliant
+      autumn leaf for her throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you!&rdquo; he would say; and then, before he could give it to her, he
+      would throw it away and take her in his arms. Afterwards she would pick up
+      the trifle and treasure it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you!&rdquo; he now said, offering her the treasure of his year&rsquo;s toil and
+      stepping back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the weight of the gift fell on her heart like a stone. She did not look
+      at it or touch it but glanced up at him. He raised his finger, signalling
+      for silence; and going to the chimney corner, brought back a long taper
+      and held it over the lamp until it ignited. Then with a look which invited
+      her to follow, he walked to the Tree and began to light the candles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began at the lowest boughs and, passing around, touched them one by
+      one. Around and around he went, and higher and higher twinkled the lights
+      as they mounted the tapering sides of the fir. At the top he kindled one
+      highest red star, shining down on everything below. Then he blew out the
+      taper, turned out the lamp; and returning to the tree, set the heavy end
+      of the taper on the floor and grasped it midway, as one might lightly hold
+      a stout staff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room, lighted now by the common glow of the candles, revealed itself
+      to be the parlor of the house elaborately decorated for the winter
+      festival. Holly wreaths hung in the windows; the walls were garlanded;
+      evergreen boughs were massed above the window cornices; on the white lace
+      of window curtains many-colored autumn leaves, pressed and kept for this
+      night, looked as though they had been blown there scatteringly by October
+      winds. The air of the room was heavy with odors; there was summer warmth
+      in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the middle of the room stood the fir tree itself, with its top close to
+      the ceiling and its boughs stretched toward the four walls of the room
+      impartially&mdash;as symbolically to the four corners of the earth. It
+      would be the only witness of all that was to take place between them: what
+      better could there be than this messenger of silence and wild secrecy?
+      From the mountains and valleys of the planet its race had looked out upon
+      a million generations of men and women; and the calmness of its lot
+      stretched across the turbulence of human passion as an ancient bridge
+      spans a modern river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the apex of the Tree a star shone. Just beneath at the first forking of
+      the boughs a candle burned. A little lower down a cross gleamed. Under the
+      cross a white dove hung poised, its pinions outstretched as though
+      descending out of the infinite upon some earthly object below. From many
+      of the branches tiny bells swung. There were little horns and little
+      trumpets. Other boughs sagged under the weight of silvery cornucopias.
+      Native and tropical fruits were tied on here and there; and dolls were
+      tied on also with cords around their necks, their feet dangling. There
+      were smiling masks, like men beheaded and smiling in their death. Near the
+      base of the Tree there was a drum. And all over the Tree from pinnacle to
+      base glittered a tinsel like golden fleece&mdash;looking as the moss of
+      old Southern trees seen at yellow sunset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation of it. This year at his own
+      request the decorations had been left wholly to him; now he seemed
+      satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to her eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember what took place on Christmas Eve last year?&rdquo; he asked,
+      with a reminiscent smile. &ldquo;You sat where you are sitting and I stood where
+      I am standing. After I had finished lighting the Tree, do you remember
+      what you said?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment she stirred and passed her fingers across her brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Recall it to me,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I must have said many things. I did not
+      know that I had said anything that would be remembered a year. Recall it
+      to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You looked at the Tree and said what a mystery it is. When and where did
+      it begin, how and why?&mdash;this Tree that is now nourished in the
+      affections of the human family round the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; I remember that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I resolved to find out for you. I determined to prepare during what hours
+      I could spare from my regular college work the gratification of your wish
+      for you as a gift from me. If I could myself find the way back through the
+      labyrinth of ages, then I would return for you and lead you back through
+      the story of the Christmas Tree as that story has never been seen by any
+      one else. All this year&rsquo;s work, then, has been the threading of the
+      labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again, my work is finished, my gift
+      to you is ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made this announcement and stopped, leaving it to clear the air of
+      mystery&mdash;the mystery of the secret work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he resumed: &ldquo;Have you, then, been the Incident in this toil as
+      yesterday you intimated that you were? Do you now see that you have been
+      the whole reason of it? You were excluded from any share in the work only
+      because you could not help to prepare your own gift! That is all. What has
+      looked like a secret in this house has been no secret. You are blinded and
+      bewildered no longer; the hour has come when holly and cedar can speak for
+      themselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sunlight broke out all over his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no reply but said within herself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has nothing to do with the trouble.
+      The secret of the house is not a misunderstanding; it is life. It is not
+      the doing of a year; it is the undoing of the years. It is not a gift to
+      enrich me with new happiness; it is a lesson that leaves me poorer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on without pausing:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is already late. The children interrupted us and took up part of your
+      evening. But it is not too late for me to present to you some little part
+      of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a short story out of the long
+      one. The whole long story is there,&rdquo; he added, directing his eyes toward
+      the manuscript at her elbow; and his voice showed how he felt a scholar&rsquo;s
+      pride in it. &ldquo;From you it can pass out to the world that celebrates
+      Christmas and that often perhaps asks the same question: What is the
+      history of the Christmas Tree? But now my story for you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a moment,&rdquo; she said, rising. She left the package where it was; and
+      with feet that trembled against the soft carpet crossed the room and
+      seated herself at one end of a deep sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gathering her dignity about her, she took there the posture of a listener&mdash;listening
+      at her ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sofa was of richly carved mahogany. Each end curved into a scroll like
+      a landward wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms rested on one of
+      the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small table on which
+      stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it profuse crimson
+      carnations hung their heads. They were one of her favorite winter flowers,
+      and he had had these sent out to her this afternoon from a hothouse of the
+      distant town by a half-frozen messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson
+      brocade swept down the wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window
+      cornices. At her back were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of
+      the sofa her piano stood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to
+      him, or played with thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music
+      also which she many a time read; as Beethoven&rsquo;s Great Nine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to window curtain
+      there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put there by the
+      children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoon they had
+      fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree felled the day
+      before&mdash;they knowing nothing, happy children!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There she reclined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness over which
+      points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in some too warm a
+      night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and the blackness of
+      her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare arms and shoulders and
+      faultless neck and faultless throat bared also. Not far away was hid the
+      warm foam-white thigh, curved like Venus&rsquo;s of old out of the sea&rsquo;s
+      inaccessible purity. About her wrists garlands of old family corals were
+      clasped&mdash;the ocean&rsquo;s roses; and on her breast, between the night of
+      her gown and the dawn of the flesh, coral buds flowered in beauty that
+      could never be opened, never be rifled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two aged house-dogs&mdash;setters
+      with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle breeding&mdash;had followed
+      her and lain down at her feet; and one with a thrust of his nose pushed
+      her skirts back from the toe of her slipper and rested his chin on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will listen,&rdquo; she said, shrinking as yet from other speech. &ldquo;I wish
+      simply to listen. There will be time enough afterwards for what I have to
+      say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall go straight through,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;One minute now while I
+      put together the story for you: it is hard to make a good short story out
+      of so vast a one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During these moments of waiting she saw a new picture of him. Under stress
+      of suffering and excitement discoveries denied to calmer hours often
+      arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a shock that causes it to
+      yawn and open its abysses: at the bottom we see new things: sometimes
+      creating new happiness; sometimes old happiness is taken away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stood there&mdash;the man beside the Tree&mdash;into the picture
+      entered three other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on the
+      walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale the
+      mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the
+      reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central portions
+      where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the rocks:
+      Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing and
+      fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and children. With
+      his passion for the wilderness&mdash;its game, enemies, campfire and
+      cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely, stern, gaunt face,
+      no modern expression in it whatsoever&mdash;the timeless face of the
+      woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of the family. This
+      man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi the central counties;
+      and wherever his power had reached, he had used it on a great scale for
+      the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer, field-maker; working to
+      bring in the period on the Shield when the hand of a man began to grasp
+      the plough instead of the rifle, when the stallion had replaced the stag,
+      and bellowing cattle wound fatly down into the pastures of the bison. This
+      man had the face of his caste&mdash;the countenance of the Southern
+      slave-holding feudal lord. Not the American face, but the Southern face of
+      a definite era&mdash;less than national, less than modern; a face not
+      looking far in any direction but at things close around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with his
+      contemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of the
+      Shield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie with remnants
+      of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near this house. This immediate
+      forefather bore the countenance that began to develop in the Northerner
+      and in the Southerner after the Civil War: not the Northern look nor the
+      Southern look, but the American look&mdash;a new thing in the American
+      face, indefinable but unmistakable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of the
+      line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of them in his
+      own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the woods as an
+      implement. In his own case, the woods around him having disappeared, the
+      ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern
+      forestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professorship his
+      original researches in this field began to attract attention. These had to
+      do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation to South Appalachian
+      civilization and thus to that of the continent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from his own
+      college and country to a Northern university.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of an
+      ancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into that
+      of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into the modern
+      American face unlike any other; now finally in him the national American
+      look had broadened into something more modern still&mdash;the look of mere
+      humanity: he did not look like an American&mdash;he looked like a man in
+      the service of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself to her as
+      one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how the past had
+      swept him along with its current; and of how the future now caught him up
+      and bore him on, part in its problems. The old passion living on in him&mdash;forest
+      life; a new passion born in him&mdash;human life. And by inexorable logic
+      these two now blending themselves to-night in a story of the Christmas
+      Tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces something intensely
+      personal to which she could cling; and she did it in this wise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they would go
+      out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; she leading
+      him this way and that way and laying upon him beautiful exactions and
+      tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not do this and not do
+      that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her down the
+      lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summer evening
+      woods; and there on the roots of some old tree&mdash;the shadows of the
+      forest behind them and the light of the western sky in their faces&mdash;they
+      would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes from each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The burning horizon became a cathedral interior&mdash;the meeting of
+      love&rsquo;s holiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil upon
+      the low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses and turf
+      of the Shield under them. The warmth of his body was as the day&rsquo;s sunlight
+      stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like its tawny bloom,
+      native to the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life with him was enchanted madness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write on the
+      air of the room. Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his classroom
+      when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standing at the
+      blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of his lecture for the
+      students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as he finished each word,
+      he read it aloud to her:
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK&rdquo;
+     </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Josephine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of it
+      float over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls of the
+      room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a spring
+      morning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. I
+      have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question the
+      blossoms in your questioning way&mdash;you who are always wishing to probe
+      the heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of their
+      significance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragrant trumpets
+      could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It was where the
+      filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of a dead past that
+      you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces of their philosophy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modern man
+      to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of the vine;
+      the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach of life; and the
+      point where it clamors for satisfaction is at the greatest possible
+      distance from its birthplace. For all these instincts send their roots
+      down through the mould of the uncivilized, down through the mould of the
+      primitive, down into the mould of the underhuman&mdash;that ancient
+      playhouse dedicated to low tragedies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of the
+      story, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are to
+      ourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kind of
+      father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beings we are
+      to our fellow beings&mdash;the passions which swell as with sap the buds
+      of those relations until they burst into their final shapes of conduct are
+      fed from the bottom of the world&rsquo;s mould. You and I to-night are building
+      the structures of our moral characters upon life-piles that sink into
+      fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our drinking cups into a vast
+      delta sweeping majestically towards the sea and catch drops trickling from
+      the springs of creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that my
+      story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human nature
+      as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have wrested it from
+      this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house on this Night of
+      the Nativity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made the scholar&rsquo;s pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy
+      narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling the
+      story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid Alpine
+      snows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of the
+      human race is the sea. It is true that man in some ancestral form was
+      rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the islanded
+      Greeks said of near Venus. Traces of this origin he still bears both in
+      his body and his emotions; and together they make up his first set of
+      memories&mdash;Sea Memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single
+      picturesque phrase:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which the
+      hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are
+      sounding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Next he told her how man&rsquo;s last marine ancestor quit one day the sea never
+      again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach and entered
+      the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, soft to impressions,
+      the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shape it over from sea
+      uses to forest uses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at the sea-shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remodelled the shell as so much clay; stood it up and twisted and
+      branched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron;
+      tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble; painted
+      it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it up as a life
+      tower&mdash;the world&rsquo;s one beacon: steadily sending it onward through one
+      trial form after another until at last had been perfected for it that
+      angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to sob and to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and entered the
+      forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared at the
+      edge of the forest the creature it had made. On every wall of its being
+      internal and external forest-written; and completely forest-minded: having
+      nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling, forest dreams, forest
+      fancies, forest faith; so that in all it could do or know or feel or dream
+      or imagine or believe it was forest-tethered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelled to
+      emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had been driven to
+      quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn of our history of
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if the first set of race memories&mdash;Sea Memories&mdash;still
+      endure within him, how much more powerful are the second set&mdash;the
+      Forest Memories!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished as
+      forest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant races on
+      the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether and will
+      become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerful that
+      those highest races which have been longest out in the open&mdash;as our
+      own Aryan race&mdash;have never ceased to be reached by the influence of
+      the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning trees falling
+      across the mortal clearings toward the sunset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlike generations
+      of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuated affections which we
+      call in ourselves the Love of Nature; these affections are inherited: new
+      feelings for nature we have none. The writers of our day who speak of
+      civilized man&rsquo;s love of nature as a developing sense err wholly. They are
+      like explorers who should mistake a boundary for the interior of a
+      continent. Man&rsquo;s knowledge of nature is modern, but it no more endows him
+      with new feeling than modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new
+      bone or his latest knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an
+      additional artery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are Forest Memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, that
+      contains the separate buried root of the story: Man&rsquo;s Forest Faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it had
+      planted in him&mdash;there to grow forever&mdash;the root of faith that he
+      was a forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the
+      science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To himself
+      forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be his
+      immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the Greeks in
+      their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were descended from
+      the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race is tethered to the
+      world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this forest faith sprang up and
+      flourished: every race was tethered to some ancestral tree. In the Orient
+      each succeeding Buddha of Indian mythology was tethered to a different
+      tree; each god of the later classical Pantheon was similarly tethered:
+      Jupiter to the oak, Apollo to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to
+      the olive, Juno to the apple, on and on. Forest worship was universal&mdash;the
+      most impressive and bewildering to modern science that the human spirit
+      has ever built up. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the
+      Trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the ages
+      toward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew with his
+      growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successive scythes of
+      time; but always new sprouts were put forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodily presence
+      within the forest; but one final day the forest lost the Immortal as its
+      indwelling creator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next the old forest worshipper peopled the trees with an intermediate race
+      of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long he beguiled
+      himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; but the lesser
+      could not maintain themselves in temples from which the greater had
+      already been expelled, and they too passed out of sight down the roadway
+      of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and during yet
+      later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woods became
+      freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals of his own race
+      had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations of the gods. Then
+      this last panorama of illusion faded also, and civilized man stood face to
+      face with the modern woods&mdash;inhabitated only by its sap and cells.
+      The trees had drawn their bark close around them, wearing an inviolate
+      tapestry across those portals through which so many a stranger to them had
+      passed in and passed out; and henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest&mdash;its
+      one reply to all man&rsquo;s questionings&mdash;became the Voice of its own
+      Mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. But we
+      must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of human
+      life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own Indo-European race
+      dwells as it were on the forest edge. And the forest still reaches out and
+      twines itself around our deepest spiritual truths: home&mdash;birth&mdash;love&mdash;prayer&mdash;death:
+      it tries to overrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our
+      houses, instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and
+      to shelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countries
+      whenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature; in
+      our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonies with
+      garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped hi
+      cathedral stone&mdash;memory of the grove, God&rsquo;s first temple; and when we
+      die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of our rest.
+      Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some obscure
+      instinct in us that it is God-forsaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for his
+      spirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf and
+      tendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every later
+      world-worship; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into the ritual of
+      Christianity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence at the
+      Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man worshipping the tree as the
+      Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we see him using that
+      tree in the worship of the creative Father&rsquo;s Son come to earth in the
+      Father&rsquo;s stead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brief tapers of
+      the night; but on it rests also the long light of that spiritual dawn when
+      man began his Adoration of the Trees. It is the forest taking its place
+      once more beside the long-lost Immortal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should address her
+      thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual for them.
+      For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the ground of his
+      lectures, and she shared his thought before it reached others. It was
+      their high and equal comradeship. Wherever his mind could go hers went&mdash;a
+      brilliant torch, a warming sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on a
+      motionless figure of stone. If he was sensible of this change in her, he
+      gave no sign. And after a moment he passed to the remaining part of the
+      story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thus far I have been speaking to you of the bare tree in wild nature:
+      here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you that they
+      too are Forest Memories&mdash;that since the evergreen moved over into the
+      service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds these Forest
+      Memories have followed it and have alighted amid its branches. Everything
+      here has its story. I am going to tell you in each case what that story
+      is; I am going to interpret everything on the Christmas Tree and the other
+      Christmas decorations in the room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him and never
+      afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoe would have
+      its; he must interpret that: and thus he himself unexpectedly had brought
+      about the situation she wished. She would meet him at that symbolic bough:
+      there be rendered the Judgment of the Years! And now as one sits down at
+      some point of a road where a traveller must arrive, she waited for him
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest
+      worshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his
+      offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in
+      offering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man had
+      learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive
+      custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during that
+      immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set one stone
+      on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove&mdash;the only
+      cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was prayer. So
+      that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the Christmas Tree
+      it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of primitive man and is as
+      ancient as forest worship itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of the fir.
+      This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of Bethlehem
+      which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the Night of the
+      Nativity&mdash;the Star of the New Born. But modern discoveries show that
+      the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or five thousand years before
+      the Christian era; and as far back as they have been traced, we find the
+      wise men of the East worshipping this same star and being guided by it in
+      their spiritual wanderings as they searched for the incarnation of the
+      Divine. They worshipped it as the star of peace and goodness and purity.
+      Many a pious Wolfram in those dim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn
+      to the same star, for love of some Chaldean Elizabeth&mdash;both he and
+      she blown about the desert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on
+      these records the star and the Tree are brought together as here side by
+      side. And the story of the star leads backward to one of the first things
+      that man ever worshipped as he looked beyond the forest: the light of the
+      heavens floating in the depth of space&mdash;light that he wanted but
+      could not grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the next object on the Tree&mdash;the candle under the star&mdash;and
+      went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at the end of ages having
+      caught this light&mdash;having brought it down in the language of his myth
+      from heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in space as having become
+      a star in his hand&mdash;the candle: the star worshipper had now become
+      also the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back to the fire
+      worshippers of ancient Persia&mdash;those highlands of the spirit seeking
+      light. We think of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merely borrowed
+      from the candle of the altar for the purpose of illumination; but the use
+      of it goes back to a time when the forest worshipper, now also the fire
+      worshipper, hung his lights on the trees, having no other altar. Far down
+      toward modern times the temples of the old Prussians, for example, were
+      oak groves, and among them a hierarchy of priests was ordained to keep the
+      sacred fire perpetually burning at the root of the sacred oak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the third object on the tree&mdash;the cross under the candle&mdash;and
+      went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event: Calvary
+      and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw and the
+      apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that age thought of the
+      cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Paul and the rest went
+      down into their graves without so regarding it. The Magdalene never clung
+      to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out at the foot of it the benizon
+      of her tears. Not until the third century after Christ did the Bishops
+      assembled at Nice announce it a Christian symbol. But it was a sacred
+      emblem in the dateless antiquity of Egypt. To primitive man it stood for
+      that sacred light and fire of life which was himself. For he himself is a
+      cross&mdash;the first cross he has ever known. The faithful may truly
+      think of the Son of Man as crucified as the image of humanity. And thus
+      ages before Christ, cross worship and forest worship were brought
+      together: for instance, among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs
+      of which made with the trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on
+      these three they cut the names of three of their gods and this was
+      holy-cross wood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on the tree&mdash;the
+      dove under the cross, and went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white dove of
+      the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the heavens were
+      opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends, overshadowing the Grail.
+      But ages before Christ the prolific white dove of Syria was worshipped
+      throughout the Orient as the symbol of reproductive Nature: and to this
+      day the Almighty is there believed to manifest himself under this form. In
+      ancient Mesopotamia the divine mother of nature is often represented with
+      this dove as having actually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand.
+      And here again forest worship early became associated with the worship of
+      the dove; for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove
+      nurtured in the oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and
+      its wings an omen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story of each
+      backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each was entwined
+      with forest worship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, he said,
+      was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of the vine.
+      And vine worship was forest worship. Moreover, in the same oak grove at
+      Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and their tinklings also were
+      sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boy beats on Christmas Day,
+      was beaten ages before Christ in the worship of Confucius: the story of it
+      dies away toward what was man&rsquo;s first written music in forgotten China. In
+      the first century of the Christian era, on one of the most splendid of the
+      old Buddhist sculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the
+      worship of the sacred tree&mdash;once more showing how music passed into
+      the service of forest faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram&rsquo;s horn&mdash;the
+      primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and used also to pour
+      out the last product of the vine in honor of the vine itself&mdash;the
+      forest&rsquo;s first goblet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldest of
+      all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learned to
+      shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could at least bring
+      to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring, the wild fruit of
+      autumn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept on until only three things on the Tree were left uninterpreted;
+      the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that he had left these
+      to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the most trivial but really
+      the most grave; for by means of them most clearly could be traced the
+      presence of great law running through the progress of humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping it like
+      a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course of ages it
+      had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forest worship: a
+      once universal custom of adorning the tree with everything most precious
+      to the giver in token of his sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Even in
+      Jeremiah is an account of the lading of the sacred tree with gold and
+      ornaments. Herodotus relates that when Xerxes was invading Lydia, on the
+      march he saw a divine tree and had it honored with golden robes and gifts.
+      Livy narrates that when Romulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal
+      City, he hung rich spoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this
+      custom of decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until
+      we can meet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden
+      Fleece and in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Now the custom
+      has dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree&mdash;the mock
+      sacrifice for the real.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind their
+      mockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing
+      prisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forest
+      worship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this to have
+      been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes. In the course of time,
+      when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mock countenance
+      replaced the real.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others, its
+      long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificing children in
+      forest worship. How common this custom was the early literature of the
+      human race too abundantly testifies. We encounter the trace of it in
+      Abraham&rsquo;s sacrifice of Isaac&mdash;arrested by the command of Jehovah. But
+      Abraham would never have thought of slaying his son to propitiate his God,
+      had not the custom been well established. In the case of Jephthah&rsquo;s
+      daughter the sacrifice was actually allowed. We come upon the same custom
+      in the fate of Iphigenia&mdash;at a critical turning point in the world&rsquo;s
+      mercy; in her stead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac&rsquo;s case, was
+      accepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against the
+      inhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock for the
+      real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of the Christmas
+      Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive rites only these
+      playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of the innocent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All the
+      little stories, like pathways running backward into the distance and ever
+      converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forest worship and
+      they met in some sacrifice by the human heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Tree is
+      all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper could not
+      worship without giving, because to worship is to give: therefore he
+      brought his gifts to the forest&mdash;his first altar. These gifts,
+      remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were his sacrifices
+      and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since, the same law
+      lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed the better to the worse;
+      in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to the best. If the race
+      should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, it would still have to
+      worship what is highest in human nature and so worshipping, it would still
+      be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice become the law of self-sacrifice:
+      it would still be necessary to offer up what is low in us to what is
+      higher. Only one portion of mankind has ever believed in Jerusalem; but
+      every religion has known its own Calvary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited her appreciation. She
+      had sat watching him without a movement and without a word. But when at
+      last she asked him a question, she spoke as a listener who wakens from a
+      long revery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you finished the story for me?&rdquo; she inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have finished the story for you,&rdquo; he replied without betraying
+      disappointment at her icy reception of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head,
+      turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throat
+      showed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays of
+      mistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not interpreted this,&rdquo; she said, her mind fixed on that sole
+      omission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not explained that,&rdquo; he admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest toward the
+      manuscript on the table across the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you explained it there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not explained it there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why?&rdquo; she said with disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why, Frederick?&rdquo; she inquired, startled into wonderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled: &ldquo;If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why do you not wish to tell me the story?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered with warning frankness: &ldquo;If you once saw it as a picture, the
+      picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life
+      darkly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She protested: &ldquo;If it is dark to you, why should I not share the darkness
+      of it? Have we not always looked at life&rsquo;s shadows together? And thus
+      seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us and dark
+      things but half as dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He merely repeated his warning: &ldquo;It is a story of a crueler age than ours.
+      It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered: &ldquo;So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to take
+      seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from the forest
+      worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not printed in books?
+      Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in libraries to be read?
+      If others read them, may not I? And since when must I begin to dread
+      anything in books? Or anything in life? And since when did we begin to
+      look at life apart, we who have always looked at it with four eyes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things to
+      see with two, and things to see with none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
+      mistletoe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me the story of this!&rdquo; she pleaded as though she demanded a right.
+      As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they closed and
+      went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the white pearls of
+      the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and were broken apart and
+      rolled across her breast into her lap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked grave; silence or speech&mdash;which were better for her?
+      Either, he now saw, would give her pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happily the story is far away from us,&rdquo; he said, as though he were half
+      inclined to grant her request.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you brought
+      the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the dove and the
+      others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me! Steep me in it as
+      you have steeped yourself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held back a long time: &ldquo;You who are so safe in good, why know evil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frederick,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;I shall have to insist upon your telling me this
+      story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know. Then tell
+      it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give each heavy
+      part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty&mdash;and truth be truth!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
+      change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into the
+      narrative of the historian:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
+      Palestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening by
+      the blue Ægean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals&mdash;the living
+      images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful eternity of
+      Art&mdash;Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in the temple
+      at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little children who
+      were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown soldiers of
+      Cæsar&rsquo;s legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the sacred grove of
+      Dodona,&mdash;where the motions of oak boughs were auguries, and the
+      flappings of the wings of white doves were divine messages, and the
+      tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine meanings,&mdash;in this grove
+      the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of Ephesus, were once a year
+      appointed to undergo similar rites. To the south Pompeii, with its night
+      laughter and song sounding far out toward the softly lapping Mediterranean
+      and up the slopes of its dread volcano, drained its goblet and did not
+      care, emptied it as often as filled and asked for nothing more. A little
+      distance off Herculaneum, with its tender dreams of Greece but with its
+      arms around the breathing image of Italy, slept&mdash;uncovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps, lay
+      unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Cæsar who was to conquer it; and
+      across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of Britain. All over
+      that island one forest; in that forest one worship; in that worship one
+      tree&mdash;the oak of England; and on that oak one bough&mdash;the
+      mistletoe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had in the
+      early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it was the
+      tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah. In Greece it was the tree of
+      Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italy it was the
+      tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of mankind. After the gods
+      passed, it became the tree of the imperial Cæsars. After the Cæsars had
+      passed, it was the oak that Michael Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered
+      over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel near the creation of man and his
+      expulsion from Paradise&mdash;there as always the chosen tree of human
+      desire. In Britain it was the sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch
+      Druid and his fellow-priests performed none of their rites without using
+      its leaves and branches: never anywhere in the world was the oak
+      worshipped with such ceremonies and sacrifices as there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine then a scene&mdash;the chief Nature Festival of that forest
+      worship: the New Year&rsquo;s day of the Druids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their way
+      to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been found with
+      mistletoe growing on it&mdash;growing there so seldom. As the excited
+      throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of reverence and
+      delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is spread. In the midst of
+      the assemblage one figure towers&mdash;the Arch Druid. Every eye is fixed
+      fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own eye may fall with wrath, he
+      may be doomed to become one of the victims annually sacrificed to the oak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is
+      clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough, and
+      making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden pruning
+      hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is blessed and
+      scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each one so
+      receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of which it is
+      Nature&rsquo;s emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have never hitherto
+      been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are slaughtered in
+      sacrifice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to
+      itself, and the New Year&rsquo;s ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the oak
+      is at an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he ended the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows
+      knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in
+      bewilderment:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why did you call that a dark story?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Where is the
+      cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will never
+      throw a dark image on my mind: New Year&rsquo;s day&mdash;the winter woods&mdash;the
+      journeying throng&mdash;the oak&mdash;the bough&mdash;the banquet beneath&mdash;the
+      white bulls with fillets on their horns&mdash;the white-robed priest&mdash;the
+      golden sickle in his hand&mdash;the stroke that severs the mistletoe&mdash;the
+      prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will be blessed in
+      life&rsquo;s sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like to paint that
+      scene. In the centre should be some young girl, pressing to her heart what
+      she believed to be heaven&rsquo;s covenant with her under the guise of a
+      blossom. How could you have wished to withhold such a story from me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled at her a little sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not yet told you all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I have told you enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under her
+      breath one word escaped:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the breath of a discovery&mdash;a discovery of something unknown to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sparing you, Josephine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the wood in
+      her clutch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sparing me?&rdquo; she asked in a tone of torture. &ldquo;Or are you sparing
+      yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed grasp
+      to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly picked it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to tell you the story,&rdquo; he said with a new quietness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was aroused by some change in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have to listen,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is better for you to know. Better
+      for any human being to know any truth than suffer the bane of wrong
+      thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be impossible for you to
+      misjudge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I do
+      not understand you are judging yourself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stepped back a pace&mdash;farther away from her&mdash;and he drew
+      himself up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the
+      right not to be pried into&mdash;not even by the nearest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer to
+      the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being thus
+      pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his shoulders.
+      The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand of the tree. The
+      fir, standing there decked out in the artificial tawdriness of a
+      double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on him&mdash;as sincere
+      as the touch of dying human fingers&mdash;and let its passing youth flow
+      into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned his head toward it as
+      with recognition. Other boughs near the floor likewise thrust themselves
+      forward, hiding his feet so that he stood ankle-deep in forestry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of it a
+      sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old forest
+      claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest tether. As he
+      had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the earlier right to
+      him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the first
+      sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen, Josephine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She buried her face in her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot! I will not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my
+      other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our
+      people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first meaning. In
+      our age of the world we come upon many playful forest survivals of what
+      were once grave things. Often in our play and pastimes and lingering
+      superstitions about the forest we cross faint traces of what were once
+      vital realities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Among these there has always been one that until recently I have never
+      understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of everywhere, is the
+      saying that if a girl is caught standing under the mistletoe, she may be
+      kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have always thought that this
+      ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to some ancient rite&mdash;I could
+      not discover what. Now I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is another scene in the forest of Britain. This time it is not the
+      first day of the year&mdash;the New Year&rsquo;s day of the Druids when they
+      celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer,
+      perhaps the middle of May&mdash;May in England&mdash;with the young beauty
+      of the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. The new moon is just
+      silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the trees.
+      The hawthorn is in bloom&mdash;red and white&mdash;and not far from the
+      spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing,
+      singing, singing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of the
+      woods&mdash;a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its youth
+      and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the all-day
+      sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild violet beds. Its
+      huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though reaching for some
+      object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as its badge of divine
+      authority, worn there as a knight might wear the colors of his Sovereign,
+      grows the mistletoe. There he stands&mdash;the Forest Lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the moon&rsquo;s
+      rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more
+      passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the scene
+      a young girl enters&mdash;her hair hanging down&mdash;her limbs most
+      lightly clad&mdash;the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her
+      skin&mdash;in her eyes love&rsquo;s great need and mystery. Step by step she
+      comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside
+      thing may stay her strength. She draws nearer to the oak, searching amid
+      its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet more dreads
+      not to find: the emblem of a woman&rsquo;s fruitfulness which the young oak&mdash;the
+      Forest Lover&mdash;reaches down toward her. Finding it, beneath it with
+      one deep breath of surrender she takes her place&mdash;the virgin&rsquo;s tryst
+      with the tree&mdash;there to be tested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience&mdash;submission to
+      that test&mdash;or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has
+      rejected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man enters&mdash;a
+      tried and seasoned man&mdash;a human oak&mdash;counterpart of the Forest
+      Lover&mdash;to officiate at the test.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence of
+      his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of
+      ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>He</i> was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was <i>his</i> feet
+      that started toward the oak; <i>his</i> eye that searched for the figure
+      half fainting under the bough; for <i>him</i> the bed of moss and violets&mdash;the
+      hair falling over the eyes&mdash;the loosened girdle&mdash;the breasts of
+      hawthorn white and pink&mdash;the listening song of the nightingale&mdash;the
+      silence of the summer woods&mdash;the seclusion&mdash;the full surrender
+      of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape the penalty
+      of their own death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his own
+      story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The light that
+      she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them&mdash;the old,
+      unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense
+      nostrils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years before
+      and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his lips&mdash;tossed
+      there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the room fell his
+      words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The storm that had broken over him died away. He shut his eyes on the
+      vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or he
+      may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine,&rdquo; he said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was sitting there before him&mdash;the mother of his children, of the
+      sleeping ones, of the buried ones&mdash;the butterfly broken on the wheel
+      of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat there with the whiteness of death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white candles
+      of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the room concealed
+      its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar from the faithful
+      tree beside the house wall had need now of its bitter rosary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit&mdash;the
+      debt of courtesy and gratitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a wonderful story, Frederick,&rdquo; she said in a manner which showed
+      him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path into
+      the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back what no
+      one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that I never
+      dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your having done
+      this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too much for me
+      to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try to understand
+      it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by waiting. But now
+      there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to speak to you about
+      that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some questions about the last part
+      of the story. I have been wanting to ask you a long time: the story gives
+      me the chance and&mdash;the right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will answer them,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If they can be answered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers passed to
+      and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn out of the
+      deeps of life and sinking back into them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frederick,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;for many years we have been happy together, so
+      happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us except the
+      loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our years,
+      lifted above life&rsquo;s storms. But of course I have realized that sooner or
+      later our lot must become the common one: if we did not go down to Sorrow,
+      Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the heights it dwells best.
+      That is why I wish to say to you to-night what I shall: I think fate&rsquo;s
+      hour has struck for me; I am ready to hear it. Its arrow has already left
+      the bow and is on its way; I open my heart to receive it. This is as I
+      have always wished; I have said that if life had any greatest tragedy, for
+      me, I hoped it would come when I was happiest; thus I should confront it
+      all. I have never drunk half of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let
+      the other half waste; I must go equally to the depth of any suffering.
+      Worse than the suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked
+      some of it, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown
+      myself a cowardly soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a pause she went over this subject as though she were not satisfied
+      that she had made it clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief that comes
+      to us in life when life is at its best&mdash;when no one is to blame&mdash;when
+      no one has committed a fault&mdash;when suffering is meted out to us as
+      the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. In earlier
+      years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all of the world&rsquo;s
+      poets felt the things that pass, even then I was wondering at the way in
+      which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow it must be separated
+      from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkening the bright disk of
+      life&rsquo;s clear tragedy, thus rendering it less bravely seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor play with
+      mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks of
+      Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf&rsquo;s bane and twist the poison
+      out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock; nor bind
+      about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count over the berries
+      of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of the beetle ticking
+      in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death moth, nor listen to the
+      elegy of the owl&mdash;the voice of ruins. Not these! they are the emblems
+      of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow are beautiful things at their
+      perfect moment; a red peony just opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on
+      the white foam, youth not yet faded but already fading, joy with its
+      finger on his lips, bidding adieu.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life&rsquo;s tragedy. And
+      to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: <i>I want to be told</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you can be told, you shall be told,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and composure.
+      Then she began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college friend.
+      You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and celebrated the
+      German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to have the Christmas
+      Tree in our house&mdash;through memory of him and of those years. You have
+      often described to me how you and he in summer went Alpine climbing, and
+      far up in some green valley girdled with glaciers lay of afternoons under
+      some fir tree, reading and drowsing in the crystalline air. You told me of
+      your nights of wandering down the Rhine together when the heart turns so
+      intimately to the heart beside it. He was German youth and song and dream
+      and happiness to you. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer
+      over the crevasse, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you
+      that began to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at the
+      friendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered out of the ideals of his youth:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The longer I knew him, the more I loved him. I never tired of being with
+      him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When he was lost,
+      the whole world lost some of its strength and nobility. After all the
+      years, if he could come back, he would find me unchanged&mdash;that friend
+      of my youth!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The doctor, Herbert and Elsie&rsquo;s father, our nearest neighbor, your
+      closest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor; he
+      is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talking with one
+      another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor and wish him
+      away? Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keep secret from me?
+      Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend of your middle life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. I never
+      tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have no disguises with
+      him and need none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them? Do
+      they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference? Have Harold
+      and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you? Do you ever
+      unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The older they grow, the more I love them. The more they interest me and
+      tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with them and I
+      live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does it develop
+      in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you the regret to be
+      something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad to toil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down the
+      stag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs for fortune, as
+      the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the cross, I follow my
+      work, I follow my work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the world
+      still morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you begin to
+      tire and to think of rest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to his work.
+      Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and why it exists
+      at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what it hates; why
+      it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless when it should be
+      true; how civilized man can fight single handed against the ages that were
+      his lower past&mdash;how he can develop self-renunciation out of
+      selfishness and his own wisdom out of surrounding folly,&mdash;all these
+      are questions that mean more and more. My work is but beginning and the
+      world is morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would you rather
+      move into a new one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take its place.
+      Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care more for it now
+      that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were a ruin, I should
+      love it best!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think more of them and take better care of them now that their hunting
+      days are over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The friend of your youth&mdash;the friend of your middle age&mdash;the
+      children&mdash;your profession&mdash;the world of human life&mdash;this
+      house&mdash;the dogs of the house&mdash;you care more for them all as time
+      passes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I care more for them all as time passes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there came a great stillness in the room&mdash;the stillness of all
+      listening years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I the only thing that you care less for as time passes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I in the way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you like to go over it all again with another?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against the end
+      of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape being
+      touched by him&mdash;to escape the blow of his words. No words came. There
+      was no touch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, looking down at
+      her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck. He must be
+      kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with a kind of
+      incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At first she could
+      so little believe it, that with her face still buried in one hand she
+      searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touch him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she cried out to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t there anything you can say to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence lasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the stillness she began to hear something&mdash;the sound of his
+      footsteps moving on the carpet. She sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was getting darker; he was putting out the candles. It was too
+      dark already to see his face. With fascination she began to watch his
+      hand. How steady it was as it moved among the boughs, extinguishing the
+      lights. Out they went one by one and back into their darkness returned the
+      emblems of darker ages&mdash;the Forest Memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A solitary taper was left burning at the pinnacle of the Tree under the
+      cross: that highest torch of love shining on everything that had
+      disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He quietly put it out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly to have travelled through
+      the open parlor door into the adjoining room, her bedroom; for out of that
+      there now streamed a suffused red light; it came from the lamp near the
+      great bed in the shadowy corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance of a
+      bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with the weight
+      of its own splendor falls face downward on the grass. And in that room
+      this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winter draperies. He
+      had been living alone as a bachelor before he married her. After they
+      became engaged he, having watched for some favorite color of hers, had had
+      this room redecorated in that shade. Every winter since she had renewed in
+      this way or that way these hangings, and now the bridal draperies remained
+      unchanged&mdash;after the changing years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He replaced the taper against the wall and came over and stood before her,
+      holding out his hands to help her rise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She arose without his aid and passed around him, moving toward her
+      bedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, he
+      followed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom and crossed
+      to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping her face
+      bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closed the door on
+      him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with which the soul tears
+      out of itself something that has been its life, she made a circlet of her
+      white arms against the door and laid her profile within this circlet and
+      stood&mdash;the figure of Memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tomb
+      where some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a far land,&mdash;walking
+      some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all human stories end; an
+      autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of its mortality and his heart
+      singing with the bird of one lost to him&mdash;lost to him in his own
+      country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other side of the door the silence was that of a tomb. She had felt
+      confident&mdash;so far as she had expected anything&mdash;that he would
+      speak to her through the door, try to open it, plead with her to open it.
+      Nothing of the kind occurred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why did he not come back? What bolt could have separated her from him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence began to weigh upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in the tense stillness she heard him moving quietly about, getting
+      ready for bed. There were the same movements, familiar to her for years.
+      She would not open the door, she could not leave it, she could not stand,
+      no support was near, and she sank to the floor and sat there, leaning her
+      brow against the lintel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other side the quiet preparations went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back of a
+      chair. The buttons made a little scraping sound against the wood. Then he
+      went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and he opened a
+      drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking of a chair under
+      him as he threw one foot and then the other up across his knee and took
+      off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her the soft movements of his
+      bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony the old impulse started in her
+      to caution him about his slippers). Then followed the brushing of his
+      teeth and the deliberate bathing of his hands. Then was audible the puff
+      of breath with which he blew out his lamp after he had turned it low; and
+      then,&mdash;on the other side of the door,&mdash;just above her ear his
+      knock sounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same knock waited for and responded to throughout the years; so often
+      with his little variations of playfulness. Many a time in early summer
+      when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing some bird
+      sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood&mdash;that tap of
+      heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though her
+      flesh were but will and spirit. When he knocked again, she was across the
+      room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her palms pressed together and
+      thrust between her knees: the instinctive act of a human animal suddenly
+      chilled to the bone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knocking sounded again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there anything you needed?&rdquo; she asked fearfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no response but another knock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure that it would reach him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there anything you wanted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greater alarm,
+      and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated her one question:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you forget anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mind refused to release itself from the iteration of that idea: it was
+      some <i>thing</i>&mdash;not herself&mdash;that he wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, now made of his knock some
+      signal of distress. It took on the authority of an appeal not to be
+      denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a little way, and once more
+      she asked her one poor question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His answer to it came in the form of a gentle pressure against the door,
+      breaking down her resistance. As she applied more strength, this was as
+      gently overcome; and when the opening was sufficient, he walked past her
+      into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How hushed the house! How still the world outside as the cloud wove in
+      darkness its mantle of light!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Day was breaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crimson curtains of the bedroom were drawn close, but from behind
+      their outer edges faint flanges of light began to advance along the wall.
+      It was a clear light reflected from snow which had sifted in against the
+      window-panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged the yard fence,
+      peaked the little gate-posts, and buried the shrubbery. There was no need
+      to look out in order to know that it had stopped snowing, that the air was
+      windless, and that the stars were flashing silver-pale except one&mdash;great
+      golden-croziered shepherd of the thick, soft-footed, moving host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Christmas morning on the effulgent Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already there was sufficient light in the room to reveal&mdash;less as
+      actual things than as brown shadows of the memory&mdash;a gay company of
+      socks and stockings hanging from the mantelpiece; sufficient to give
+      outline to the bulk of a man asleep on the edge of the bed; and it exposed
+      to view in a corner of the room farthest from the rays a woman sitting in
+      a straight-backed chair, a shawl thrown about her shoulders over her
+      night-dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He always slept till he was awakened; the children, having stayed up past
+      their usual bedtime, would sleep late also; she had the white dawn to
+      herself in quietness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She needed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sleep could not have come to her had she wished. She had not slept and she
+      had not lain down, and the sole endeavor during those shattered hours had
+      been to prepare herself for his awakening. She was not yet ready&mdash;she
+      felt that during the rest of her life she should never be quite ready to
+      meet him again. Scant time remained now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment and outdoor noises would begin.
+      Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of its size, rose
+      by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town was proud of its
+      smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields; whereever any
+      hamlet marked the point at which two country roads this morning made the
+      sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudly castled on woody
+      hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder from amid their olive-dark
+      winter pastures; or far away on the shaggy uplift of the Shield wherever
+      any cabin clung like a swallow&rsquo;s nest against the gray Appalachian wall&mdash;everywhere
+      soon would begin the healthy outbreak of joy among men and women and
+      children&mdash;glad about themselves, glad in one another, glad of human
+      life in a happy world. The many-voiced roar and din of this warm carnival
+      lay not far away from her across the cold bar of silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon within the house likewise the rush of the children&rsquo;s feet would
+      startle her ear; they would be tugging at the door, tugging at her heart.
+      And as she thought of this, the recollection of old simple things came
+      pealing back to her from behind life&rsquo;s hills. The years parted like naked
+      frozen reeds, and she, sorely stricken in her womanhood, fled backward
+      till she herself was a child again&mdash;safe in her father&rsquo;s and mother&rsquo;s
+      protection. It was Christmas morning, and she in bare feet was tipping
+      over the cold floors toward their bedroom&mdash;toward her stockings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father and mother! How she needed them at this moment: they had been
+      sweethearts all their lives. One picture of them rose with distinctness
+      before her&mdash;for the wounding picture always comes to the wounded
+      moment. She saw them sitting in their pew far down toward the chancel.
+      Through a stained glass window (where there was a ladder of angels) the
+      light fell softly on them&mdash;both silver-haired; and as with the voices
+      of children they were singing out of one book. She remembered how as she
+      sat between them she had observed her father slip his hand into her
+      mother&rsquo;s lap and clasp hers with a steadfastness that wedded her for
+      eternity; and thus over their linked hands, with the love of their youth
+      within them and the snows of the years upon them, they sang together:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Gently, Lord, O gently lead us
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+  &ldquo;Through the changes Thou&rsquo;st decreed us.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Her father and mother had not been led gently. They had known more than
+      common share of life&rsquo;s shocks and violence, its wrongs and meannesses and
+      ills and griefs. But their faith had never wavered that they were being
+      led gently; so long as they were led together, to them it was gentle
+      leading: the richer each in each for aught whereby nature or man could
+      leave them poorer; the calmer for the shocks; the sweeter for the sour;
+      the finer with one another because of life&rsquo;s rudenesses. In after years
+      she often thought of them as faithful in their dust; and the flowers she
+      planted over them and watered many a bright day with happy tears brought
+      up to her in another form the freshness of their unwearied union.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was what she had not doubted her own life would be&mdash;with him&mdash;when
+      she had married him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the moment of the night before when he had forced the door open and
+      entered her room, they had not exchanged any words nor a glance. He had
+      lain down and soon fallen asleep; apparently he had offered that to her as
+      for the moment at least his solution of the matter&mdash;that he should
+      leave her to herself and absent himself in slumber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instant she knew him to be asleep she set about her preparations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before he awoke she must be gone&mdash;out of the house&mdash;anywhere&mdash;to
+      save herself from living any longer with him. His indifference in the
+      presence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touch and
+      glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life&rsquo;s
+      valleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing the
+      whole truth, know it she should: all this left her wounded and stunned as
+      by an incredible blow, and she was acting first from the instinct of
+      removing herself beyond the reach of further humiliation and brutality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instinctively she took off her wedding ring and laid it on his dresser
+      beside his watch: he would find it there in the morning and he could
+      dispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the plainest heavy one and
+      put on heavy walking shoes. She packed into a handbag a few necessary
+      things with some heirlooms of her own. Among the latter was a case of
+      family jewels; and as she opened it, her eyes fell upon her mother&rsquo;s thin
+      wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped that on and kissed it
+      bitterly. She lifted out also her mother&rsquo;s locket containing a miniature
+      daguerreotype of her father and dutifully fed her eyes on that. Her father
+      was not silver-haired then, but raven-locked; with eyes that men feared at
+      times but no woman ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbed her
+      exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she, coarsely
+      wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, opened her front
+      door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, and passed out&mdash;wading
+      away. Those eyes of his saw what took place the next day: the happiness of
+      Christmas morning turned into horror; the children wild with distress and
+      crying&mdash;the servants dumb&mdash;the inquiry at neighbors&rsquo; houses&mdash;the
+      news spreading to the town&mdash;the papers&mdash;the black ruin. And from
+      him two restraining words issued for her ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My daughter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answered him.
+      And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her blood took fire
+      and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. She stopped her
+      preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its place
+      with exaggerated pains. Having done this, she stood in the middle of the
+      floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to that power of low
+      suggestion which is one of anger&rsquo;s weapons, she began to devise malice.
+      She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took from a bottom drawer&mdash;where
+      long ago it had been stored away under everything else&mdash;a shawl that
+      had been her grandmother&rsquo;s; a brindled crewel shawl,&mdash;sometimes worn
+      by superannuated women of a former generation; a garment of hideousness.
+      Once, when a little girl, she had loyally jerked it off her grandmother
+      because it added to her ugliness and decrepitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around her
+      shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting it off,
+      gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She turned the lamp
+      up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge lidless eye of it
+      would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew a rocking chair to the
+      foot of the bed and seating herself put her forefinger up to each temple
+      and drew out from their hiding places under the mass of her black hair two
+      long gray locks and let these hang down haglike across her bosom. She
+      banished the carefully nourished look of youth from her face&mdash;dropped
+      the will to look young&mdash;and allowed the forced-back years to rush
+      into it&mdash;into the wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature,
+      assisting each other so ably, had wrought in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of the
+      lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in exultation
+      of vengeance that she was to live on there in his house&mdash;<i>his</i>
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while a darker mood came over her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the room.
+      She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it would be
+      screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber was heaviest,
+      into that shadow she retired and in it she sat&mdash;with furtive look to
+      see whether he observed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was
+      Anglo-Saxon blood of the world&rsquo;s fiercest; floating in the tide of it
+      passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in
+      tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but fiercest
+      ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A thousand years
+      from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting beside some sleeping
+      father of hers in their forest-beleaguered castle&mdash;the moonlight
+      streaming in upon him through the javelined casement and putting before
+      her the manly beauty of him&mdash;the blond hair matted thick on his
+      forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth reddening in his slumber
+      under its curling gold&mdash;some mother of hers whom he had carried off
+      from other men by might of his sword, thus sitting beside him and knowing
+      him to be colder to her now than the moon&rsquo;s dead rays, might have watched
+      those rays as they travelled away from his figure and put a gleam on his
+      sword hanging near: a thousand years ago: some mother of hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers so
+      often to take its place. The best and the worst&mdash;these are the sole
+      alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making: hence life&rsquo;s
+      spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever present about us.
+      Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the best as their first
+      choice, fight their way through defeat to the standard of the second best
+      and fight on there. And whatever one may think of the legend otherwise,
+      abundant experience justifies the story that it was the Archangel who fell
+      to the pit. The low never fall far: how can they? They already dwell on
+      the bottom of things, and many a time they are to be seen there with
+      vanity that they should inhabit such a privileged highland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the tragic
+      duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a height of moral
+      splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to the lowest she
+      harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or as the stirred
+      sediment of her own imperfections. And as is unfortunately true, this
+      descent into moral darkness possessed the grateful illusion that it was an
+      ascent into new light. All evil prompting became good suggestion; every
+      injustice made its claim to be justification. She enjoyed the elation of
+      feeling that she was dragging herself out of life&rsquo;s quicksands upward to
+      some rock, where there might be loneliness for her, but where there would
+      be cleanness. The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred;
+      and hatred is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it
+      needs not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its
+      faithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled most poignantly in
+      this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact that the cloven
+      hoof should have been found on noble mountain tops&mdash;that he should
+      have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling near regions of
+      sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable to her was that which
+      dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now his whole story of the
+      Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words about the growth of the
+      world&rsquo;s spirit&mdash;about the sacrifice of the lower in ourselves to the
+      higher&mdash;this cant now became to her the invocation and homage of the
+      practised impostor: he had indeed carried the Christmas Tree on his
+      shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of Immortal Purity for mankind
+      but the manger of his own bestiality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with
+      spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when he
+      had let her know that he wanted to be free&mdash;at that moment she might
+      tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his unworthiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the devil
+      in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon companions.
+      And at one period of the night she began to look back upon her experience
+      with a curious sense of prior familiarity&mdash;to see it as a story
+      already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the first stage of
+      one of those tragedies that later find their way into the care of family
+      physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the confidence of clergymen,
+      into the papers and divorce courts, and that receive their final flaying
+      or canonization on the stage and in novels of the time. Sitting at a
+      distance, she had within recent years studied in a kind of altruistic
+      absorption how the nation&rsquo;s press, the nation&rsquo;s science of medicine, the
+      nation&rsquo;s science of law, the nation&rsquo;s practice of religion, and the
+      nation&rsquo;s imaginative literature were all at work with the same national
+      omen&mdash;the decay of the American family and the downfall of the home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had
+      incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where the
+      older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation rock. The
+      corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited her; and thus
+      to-night she took her place among those women whom the world first hears
+      of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of refuge and in their
+      graves&mdash;and more sadly elsewhere; whose misfortunes interested the
+      press and whose types attracted the novelists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was one of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who
+      unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity&mdash;or
+      walks into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under
+      another name or with another lot lives on&mdash;devoting herself to memory
+      or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to the
+      world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains to her
+      but living apart&mdash;on the other side of the locked door; the woman who
+      stays on without locking the door, half-hating, half-loving&mdash;the
+      accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who welcomes the end of the
+      love-drama as the beginning of peace and the cessation of annoyances; the
+      woman who begins to act her tragedy to servants and children and
+      acquaintances&mdash;reaping sympathy for herself and sowing ruin and
+      torture&mdash;for him; the woman who drops the care of house, ends his
+      comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value as at least an
+      investment toward his general well-being; the woman who endeavors to
+      rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh fascinations; the woman
+      who plays upon jealousy and touches the male instinct to keep one&rsquo;s own
+      though little prized lest another acquire it and prize it more; the woman
+      who sets a watch to discover the other woman: they swarmed about her, she
+      identified each.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their
+      companionship; a strange dread moved her lest <i>they</i> should discover
+      <i>her</i>. One only she detached from the throng and for a while withdrew
+      with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who when so rejected
+      turns to another man&mdash;the man who is waiting somewhere near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man <i>she</i> turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the
+      country doctor, her husband&rsquo;s tried and closest friend, whose children
+      were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years <i>her</i>
+      secret had been&mdash;the doctor. When she had come as a bride into that
+      neighborhood, he, her husband&rsquo;s senior by several years, was already well
+      established in his practice. He had attended her at the birth of her first
+      child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had discovered that he loved
+      her; she could never have him again. This had dealt his professional
+      reputation a wound, but he understood, and he welcomed the wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from the
+      turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep alongside her,
+      she could hear the doctor&rsquo;s buggy passing on its way to some patient, or
+      on its return from the town where he had patients also. Many a time she
+      had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of his life there turned in
+      to her. There were nights of pitch darkness and beating rain; and
+      sometimes on these she had to know that he was out there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where her
+      husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the doctor. He would
+      be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and enveloped it. She
+      groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old lost human paths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The endless night scarcely moved on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was wearied out, she was exhausted. There is anger of such intensity
+      that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations that are its fuel;
+      nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame, and being unfed,
+      it dies out. Moreover, it is the destiny of a portion of mankind that they
+      are enjoined by their very nobility from winning low battles; these always
+      go against them: the only victories for them are won when they are leading
+      the higher forces of human nature in life&rsquo;s upward conflicts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neither
+      moral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundless
+      plain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm; and
+      slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like the
+      radiance of the storm-winged sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures appeared&mdash;her
+      children. Hitherto the energies of her mind had grappled with the problem
+      of her future; now memories began&mdash;memories that decide more perhaps
+      than anything else for us. And memories began with her children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it with
+      the palm of her hand, started upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear
+      stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the broad
+      stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit she started
+      to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew back. This room
+      had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the Years. She shrank from it as
+      one who has been arraigned may shrink from a tribunal where sentence has
+      been pronounced which changes the rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits,
+      its toys, its ribbons, but deepened the derision and the bitterness. And
+      the evergreen there in the middle of the room&mdash;it became to her as
+      that tree of the knowledge of good and evil which at Creation&rsquo;s morning
+      had driven Woman from Paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house, but
+      paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he should awake
+      in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was? Would he call out
+      to her&mdash;with what voice? Would he come to seek her&mdash;with what
+      emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now&mdash;the drift back to
+      the old mooring.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear of
+      remembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to the
+      last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seek her. It
+      had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room to room for the
+      delight of proving how persistently he would prolong his search. But one
+      day some two years before this, when she had entered his study about the
+      usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for his writing desk, she saw
+      him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on, making some notes. The sight
+      had struck the flowers from her hands; she swiftly gathered them up, and
+      going to her room, shut herself in; she knew it was the beginning of the
+      end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre of the
+      bedchamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he had done or
+      failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself. Everything else
+      had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; the old touch abandoning
+      the hands; less time for her in the house, more for work; constraint
+      beginning between them, the awkwardness of reserve; she seeing Nature&rsquo;s
+      movement yet refusing to believe it; then at last resolving to know to the
+      uttermost and choosing her bridal night as the hour of the ordeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he awoke, would he come to seek her&mdash;with what feelings?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her right hand
+      and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There was a turn in
+      the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle rays fell on the
+      face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on a step, putting the
+      candle beside her; and there she remained, her elbows on her knees, her
+      face resting on her palms; and into the abyss of the night dropped the
+      tranquil strokes. More memories!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding
+      lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness
+      overflowing its dumb environs&mdash;humanizing these&mdash;drawing them
+      toward her by a gracious responsive symbolism&mdash;extending speech over
+      realms which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have
+      struck into speechlessness long æons past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden God of Hours; she had
+      often feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of it she
+      would pin inside the walls little clusters of blossoms as votive
+      offerings: if it would only move faster and bring him home! The usual hour
+      of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She had symbolized
+      that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for the children&mdash;the
+      three in one&mdash;the trinity of the household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him, up
+      to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: all is
+      well!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first sound that had reached her from any source during this
+      agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outside humanity;
+      from Time itself which brings us together and holds us together as long as
+      possible and then separates us and goes on its way&mdash;indifferent
+      whether we are together or apart; Time which welds the sands into the rock
+      and then wears the rock away to its separate sands and sends the level
+      tide softly over them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once for him, once for her, once for the children! She took up the candle
+      and went upstairs to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two little
+      girls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and in another
+      room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turned on one
+      another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fist outside the
+      cover. In a few years how differently the four would be divided and
+      paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife; and out of the
+      lives of the two of them who were hers she would then drop into some
+      second place. If to-night she were realizing what befalls a wife when she
+      becomes the Incident to her husband, she would then realize what befalls a
+      woman when the mother becomes the Incident to her children: Woman, twice
+      the Incident in Nature&rsquo;s impartial economy! Her son would playfully
+      confide it to his bride that she must bear with his mother&rsquo;s whims and
+      ways. Her daughter would caution her husband that he must overlook
+      peculiarities and weaknesses. The very study of perfection which she
+      herself had kindled and fanned in them as the illumination of their lives
+      they would now turn upon her as a searchlight of her failings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of his
+      discussing her with any human being. Even though he should some day desert
+      her, he would never discuss her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with her against
+      the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strength from her
+      to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow. But now she began to ask
+      herself whether his protection <i>had</i> failed her. Could he have
+      recognized the situation without rendering it worse? Had he put his arms
+      around her, might she not have&mdash;struck at him? Had he laid a
+      finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not have left a scar for life?
+      Any words of his, would they not have rung in her ears unceasingly? To
+      pass it over was as though it had never been&mdash;was not <i>that</i> his
+      protection?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed her
+      child in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor&rsquo;s children&mdash;with
+      memory of their mother; and then she descended by the rear stairway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she had placed
+      the lamp&mdash;near the manuscript&mdash;and she sat down and looked at
+      that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had made her the gift of his work&mdash;dedicated to her the triumphs
+      of his toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his widening
+      career and enter with him into the world&rsquo;s service. She crossed her hands
+      over it awhile, and then she left it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the
+      immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.
+      After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the
+      echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music only,&mdash;the
+      rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She sat there now
+      quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear began faintly to
+      beat the sad sublime tones of his story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watch the
+      youth of the hemp&mdash;a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If
+      the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulse
+      swayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads were
+      instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and east wind
+      sent it west.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we sometimes
+      call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It is run through by
+      many different laws; governed by many distinct forces, each of which
+      strives to control it wholly&mdash;but never does. Selfishness blows on it
+      like a parching sirocco, and all things seem to bow to the might of
+      selfishness. Generosity moves across the expanse, and all things are seen
+      responsive to what is generous. Place yourself where life is lowest and
+      everything like an avalanche is rushing to the bottom. Place yourself
+      where character is highest, and lo! the whole world is but one struggle
+      upward to what is high. You see what you care to see, and find what you
+      wish to find.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his story of the Forest and the Heart he had wanted to trace but one
+      law, and he had traced it; he had drawn all things together and bent them
+      before its majesty: the ancient law of Sacrifice. Of old the high
+      sacrificed to the low; afterwards the low to the high: once the sacrifice
+      of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but always in ourselves of the
+      lower to the higher in order that, dying, we may live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With this law he had made his story a story of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldæa; the candle bore it to
+      ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the
+      dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it to
+      Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and Rome; the
+      doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe to Britain,&mdash;and
+      all brought it to Christ,&mdash;Christ the latest world-ideal of sacrifice
+      that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of all for all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story was for herself, he had said, and for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Himself! Here at last all her pain and wandering of this night ended: at
+      the bottom of her wound where rankled <i>his problem</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this problem she had most shrunk and into this she now entered: She
+      sacrificed herself in him! She laid upon herself his temptation and his
+      struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking her candle, she passed back into her bedroom and screened it where
+      she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her wedding ring on again with blanched lips. She went to his
+      bedside, and drawing to the pillow the chair on which his clothes were
+      piled, sat down and laid her face over on it; and there in that shrine of
+      feeling where speech is formed, but whence it never issues, she made her
+      last communion with him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>&ldquo;You, to whom I gave my youth and all that youth could mean to me;
+      whose children I have borne and nurtured at my breast&mdash;all of whose
+      eyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of whom I have closed; husband
+      of my girlhood, loved as no woman ever loved the man who took her home;
+      strength and laughter of his house; helper of what is best in me; my
+      defender against things in myself that I cannot govern; pathfinder of my
+      future; rock of the ebbing years! Though my hair turn white as driven snow
+      and flesh wither to the bone, I shall never cease to be the flame that you
+      yourself have kindled. </i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where there must
+      be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heard our
+      whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences&mdash;the
+      Long Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clung to!&mdash;Adieu!&mdash;Adieu!&mdash;Adieu!&mdash;Adieu!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would not
+      lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his pillow the
+      last drop of things that must go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She there&mdash;her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life&rsquo;s
+      Calvary of the Snows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, and there it
+      brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near when she must awaken
+      him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over before the children rushed
+      downstairs or the servants knocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the gray
+      told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly away from
+      brow and temples so that the contour of her head&mdash;one of nature&rsquo;s
+      noblest&mdash;was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the women of her
+      land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of their baptism into a
+      new life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders rising out
+      of this had the austerity of marble&mdash;exempt not from ruin, but exempt
+      from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once and made a little
+      instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide them under the
+      sleeves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and
+      quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it. Then
+      she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes&mdash;the look of
+      the rejected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed,
+      resting on one elbow and looking down at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For years her first words to him on this day had been the world&rsquo;s best
+      greeting:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Merry Christmas!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and instantly
+      looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out of it all,
+      what their life was to be henceforth, what their future would be worth.
+      But at the sight of her so changed&mdash;something so gone out of her
+      forever&mdash;with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She struggled
+      to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly about the
+      youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his face. She caught at
+      one of the braids of her hair and threw it across her eyes, and then
+      silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her. The torrent of her
+      tears raining down into his tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tears not for Life&rsquo;s faults but for Life when there are no faults. They
+      locked in each other&rsquo;s arms&mdash;trying to save each other on Nature&rsquo;s
+      vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rush of children&rsquo;s feet was heard in the hall and there was smothered
+      laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Christmas Morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward over the
+      gladness of the Shield. The farmhouse&mdash;such as the poet had sung of
+      when he could not help singing of American home life&mdash;looked out from
+      under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller who laughs
+      at the snow on his hat and shoulders. Smoke poured out of its chimneys,
+      bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak tree beside it stood
+      quieted of its moaning and tossing. Soon after sunrise a soul of passion
+      on scarlet wings, rising out of the snow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a
+      topmost twig of the oak; and sitting there with its breast to the gorgeous
+      sun scanned for a little while that landscape of ice. It was beyond its
+      intelligence to understand how nature could create it for Summer and then
+      take Summer away. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a
+      sun so true could shine on a world so false.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovelling paths.
+      After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with fireside
+      warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat, rushed out of the
+      front door pursued by a little soldier sternly booted and capped and
+      gloved; and the two snowballed each other, going at it furiously. Watching
+      them through a window a little girl, dancing a dreamy measure of her own,
+      ever turned inward and beckoned to some one to come and look&mdash;beckoned
+      in vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the little girl
+      played with the doll&mdash;hugged to her breast the symbol of ancient
+      sacrifice, the emblem of the world&rsquo;s new mercy. Along the turnpike
+      sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and the
+      shouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across the
+      shining valleys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from its surroundings;
+      just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low, thick, covered with
+      snow except where a bough had been broken off for decorating the house;
+      here owing to the steepness the snow slid off. The spot looked like a
+      wound in the side of the Divine purity, and across this open wound the
+      tree had hung its rosary-beads never to be told by Sorrow&rsquo;s fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backward across
+      the sadness of the Shield. One by one the stars came back to their
+      faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinging lamp was
+      lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little round mats of snow
+      stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost a low Christmas star
+      was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; and between those beacons
+      soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and children assembling for
+      the party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late into the night the party lasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went to
+      ashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and the
+      robust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of our
+      life. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate and
+      drank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to go
+      faster than the music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on the
+      Christmas Tree&mdash;the handing over to this person and to that person of
+      those unread lessons of the ages&mdash;little mummied packages of the lord
+      of time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced those burnt
+      out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were white now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene!
+      Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house:
+      hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughing and
+      talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to the doctor&rsquo;s
+      wife&mdash;faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be the American
+      wife and mother in the home of the poet&rsquo;s dream: the spiritual majesty of
+      her bridal veil still about her amid life&rsquo;s snow as it never lifts itself
+      from the face of the <i>Jungfrau</i> amid the sad most lovely mountains:
+      the American wife and mother!&mdash;herself the <i>Jungfrau</i> among the
+      world&rsquo;s women!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takes
+      place there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the State
+      which is also a song of the Nation&mdash;its melody of the unfallen home:
+      with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated at the
+      piano&mdash;the others upholding her like a living bulwark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of: those
+      Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the embodied&mdash;the
+      Guests of the Imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambers arm
+      and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that present scene
+      nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree the Wraiths
+      of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naught of those
+      later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to fill their places.
+      Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes that bent undivided
+      attention upon the actual pageant: these were Life&rsquo;s Pities. Ever and anon
+      they would lift their noble veils and look out upon that brief flicker of
+      our mortal joy, and drop them and relapse into their compassionate vigil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filled the
+      entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through the rooms
+      with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckoned her to a
+      place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered back peeped shyly
+      at her but then with some sure instinct of recognition ran to her and
+      threw down their gifts, to put their arms around her. And the Pities
+      before they left the house that night walked past her one by one and each
+      lifted its veil and dropped it more softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the Shape:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet under the chandelier&mdash;which
+      had no decoration whatsoever&mdash;stood an exquisite Spirit of Youth,
+      more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet most alive; her lips
+      scarce parted&mdash;her skin like white hawthorn shadowed by pink&mdash;in
+      her eyes the modesty of withdrawal from Love&mdash;in her heart the
+      surrender to it. During those distracting hours never did she move nor did
+      her look once change: she waiting there&mdash;waiting for some one to come&mdash;waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Waiting.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg&rsquo;s Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
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+</pre>
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+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
+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: Bride of the Mistletoe
+
+Author: James Lane Allen
+
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9179]
+This file was first posted on September 11, 2003
+Last updated: April 30, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE
+
+By James Lane Allen
+
+
+
+Author Of "Flute And Violin," "A Kentucky Cardinal," "Aftermath," Etc.
+
+
+
+TO ONE WHO KNOWS
+
+
+Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raissoner.  Mais il
+faut regarder beaucoup et songer a ce qu'on a vu.  Voir: tout est la,
+et voir juste. J'entends, par voir juste, voir avec ses propres yeux
+et non avec ceux des maitres.  L'originalite d'un artiste s'indique
+d'abord dans les petites choses et non dans les grandes.
+
+Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n'a pas encore
+decouverte et tacher de l'exprimer d'une facon personelle.
+
+--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Any one about to read this work of fiction might properly be apprised
+beforehand that it is not a novel: it has neither the structure nor
+the purpose of The Novel.
+
+It is a story. There are two characters--a middle-aged married couple
+living in a plain farmhouse; one point on the field of human nature is
+located; at that point one subject is treated; in the treatment one
+movement is directed toward one climax; no external event whatsoever
+is introduced; and the time is about forty hours.
+
+A second story of equal length, laid in the same house, is expected to
+appear within a twelvemonth. The same father and mother are
+characters, and the family friend the country doctor; but
+subordinately all. The main story concerns itself with the four
+children of the two households.
+
+It is an American children's story:
+
+"A Brood of The Eagle."
+
+During the year a third work, not fiction, will be published,
+entitled:
+
+"The Christmas Tree: An Interpretation."
+
+The three works will serve to complete each other, and they complete a
+cycle of the theme.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+       EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+
+    I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+
+   II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+
+  III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+
+   IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+
+    V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+
+   VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+
+
+
+
+EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+
+
+A mighty table-land lies southward in a hardy region of our country.
+It has the form of a colossal Shield, lacking and broken in some of
+its outlines and rough and rude of make. Nature forged it for some
+crisis in her long warfare of time and change, made use of it, and so
+left it lying as one of her ancient battle-pieces--Kentucky.
+
+The great Shield is raised high out of the earth at one end and sunk
+deep into it at the other. It is tilted away from the dawn toward the
+sunset.  Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet, Nature,
+cunning artificer, set the stream of ocean flowing past with restless
+foam--the Father of Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound a
+bright river to the rim of silver. And where the eastern part rises
+loftiest on the horizon, turned away from the reddening daybreak, she
+piled shaggy mountains wooded with trees that loose their leaves ere
+snowflakes fly and with steadfast evergreens which hold to theirs
+through the gladdening and the saddening year. Then crosswise over the
+middle of the Shield, northward and southward upon the breadth of it,
+covering the life-born rock of many thicknesses, she drew a tough skin
+of verdure--a broad strip of hide of the ever growing grass. She
+embossed noble forests on this greensward and under the forests drew
+clear waters.
+
+This she did in a time of which we know nothing--uncharted ages before
+man had emerged from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder, thoughts
+to wander, heart to love, and spirit to pray. Many a scene the same
+power has wrought out upon the surface of the Shield since she brought
+him forth and set him there: many an old one, many a new. She has made
+it sometimes a Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace.  Nor has
+she yet finished with its destinies as she has not yet finished with
+anything in the universe.  While therefore she continues her will and
+pleasure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not forget the
+Shield.
+
+She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which admonish man how
+little his lot has changed since Hephaistos wrought like scenes upon
+the shield of Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like a
+falcon from snowy Olympus bearing the glittering piece of armor to her
+angered son.
+
+These are some of the scenes that were wrought on the shield of
+Achilles and that to-day are spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky:
+
+Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze of lights as they lead the
+bride from her chamber, flutes and violins sounding merrily. An
+assembly-place where the people are gathered, a strife having arisen
+about the blood-price of a man slain; the old lawyers stand up one
+after another and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, freshly
+ploughed fields where ploughmen drive their teams to and fro, the
+earth growing dark behind the share. The estate of a landowner where
+laborers are reaping; some armfuls the binders are binding with
+twisted bands of straw: among them the farmer is standing in silence,
+leaning on his staff, rejoicing in his heart. Vineyards with purpling
+clusters and happy folk gathering these in plaited baskets on sunny
+afternoons.  A herd of cattle with incurved horns hurrying from the
+stable to the woods where there is running water and where
+purple-topped weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen with white
+sheep. A dancing-place under the trees; girls and young men dancing,
+their fingers on one another's wrists: a great company stands watching
+the lovely dance of joy.
+
+Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles as art; as pageants
+of life they appear on the Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker of
+old wrought them upon the armor of the Greek warrior in tin and
+silver, bronze and gold. The world-designer sets them to-day on the
+throbbing land in nerve and blood, toil and delight and passion. But
+there with the old things she mingles new things, with the never
+changing the ever changing; for the old that remains always the new
+and the new that perpetually becomes old--these Nature allots to man
+as his two portions wherewith he must abide steadfast in what he is
+and go upward or go downward through all that he is to become.
+
+But of the many scenes which she in our time sets forth upon the
+stately grassy Shield there is a single spectacle that she spreads
+over the length and breadth of it once every year now as best liked by
+the entire people; and this is both old and new.
+
+It is old because it contains man's faith in his immortality, which
+was venerable with age before the shield of Achilles ever grew
+effulgent before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new because it
+contains those latest hopes and reasons for this faith, which briefly
+blossom out upon the primitive stock with the altering years and soon
+are blown away upon the winds of change. Since this spectacle, this
+festival, is thus old and is thus new and thus enwraps the deepest
+thing in the human spirit, it is never forgotten.
+
+When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or sows in the teeth of the
+wind and glances at the fickle sky; when under the summer shade of a
+flowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted herds and fattening
+grain; whether there is autumnal plenty in his barn or autumnal
+emptiness, autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal strife,--all days
+of the year, in the assembly-place, in the dancing-place, whatsoever
+of good or ill befall in mind or hand, never does one forget.
+
+When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seems
+farthest from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when the
+fields lie shorn between harvest-time and seed-time and man turns
+wistful eyes back and forth between the mystery of his origin and the
+mystery of his end,--then comes the great pageant of the winter
+solstice, then comes Christmas.
+
+So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differing
+but always identical mortals?
+
+It was once the old pagan festival of dead Nature. It was once the old
+pagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival when
+the hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It was
+the pagan festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants of
+an upper world upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, and
+the production of a race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is now
+the festival of the Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortal
+children. It is now the new festival of man's remembrance of his
+errors and his charity toward erring neighbors. It has latterly become
+the widening festival of universal brotherhood with succor for all
+need and nighness to all suffering; of good will warring against ill
+will and of peace warring upon war.
+
+And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the
+festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it
+is on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an
+age to many people--the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen;
+setting forth man's pathetic love of youth--of his own youth that will
+not stay with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds its
+ancient way upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light.
+
+This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield.
+
+
+
+
+I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+
+
+A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country a
+few years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
+
+One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the desk
+near his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing and
+turned the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of his
+mental travels--for such he followed--was now passing through the
+evergreens.
+
+Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned there
+like short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths and
+customs of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper,
+as gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the large
+one.  It dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the
+class of those that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which
+possess them as unsafe reading for unsafe minds.
+
+Sheets of paper covered with the man's clear, deliberate handwriting
+lay thickly on the desk.  A table in the centre of the room was strewn
+with volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On the
+tops of two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representing
+scenes from the oldest known art of the East. These and other prints
+hanging about the walls, however remote from each other in the times
+and places where they had been gathered, brought together in this room
+of a quiet Kentucky farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object:
+the subject related in general to trees and in especial evergreens.
+
+While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to be
+submerged. His left hand was always going out to one or the other of
+three picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly.
+
+Two of these frames held photographs of four young children--a boy and
+a girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being well
+enough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unruly
+and disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of them
+looked straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American frankness
+and good humor; all had mouths shut tight with American energy and
+determination. Apparently they already believed that the New World was
+behind them, that the nation backed them up. In a way you believed
+it. You accepted them on the spot as embodying that marvellous
+precocity in American children, through which they early in life
+become conscious of the country and claim it their country and believe
+that it claims them. Thus they took on the distinction of being a
+squad detached only photographically from the rank and file of the
+white armies of the young in the New World, millions and millions
+strong, as they march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous, magnificent,
+toward new times and new destinies for the nation and for humanity--a
+kinder knowledge of man and a kinder ignorance of God.
+
+The third frame held the picture of a woman probably thirty years of
+age. Her features were without noticeable American characteristics.
+What human traits you saw depended upon what human traits you saw
+with.
+
+The hair was dark and abundant, the brows dark and strong. And the
+lashes were dark and strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornily
+hedged about, somehow brought up before you a picture of autumn
+thistles--thistles that look out from the shadow of a rock. They had a
+veritable thistle quality and suggestiveness: gray and of the fields,
+sure of their experience in nature, freighted with silence.
+
+Despite grayness and thorniness, however, you saw that they were in
+the summer of their life-bloom; and singularly above even their beauty
+of blooming they held what is rare in the eyes of either men or
+women--they held a look of being just.
+
+The whole face was an oval, long, regular, high-bred. If the lower
+part had been hidden behind a white veil of the Orient (by that little
+bank of snow which is guardedly built in front of the overflowing
+desires of the mouth), the upper part would have given the impression
+of reserve, coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that one
+look--the garnered wisdom, the tempering justice, of the eyes. The
+whole face being seen, the lower features altered the impression made
+by the upper ones; reserve became bettered into strength, coldness
+bettered into dignity, severity of intellect transfused into glowing
+nobleness of character. The look of virgin justice in her was perhaps
+what had survived from that white light of life which falls upon young
+children as from a receding sun and touches lingeringly their smiles
+and glances; but her mouth had gathered its shadowy tenderness as she
+walked the furrows of the years, watching their changeful harvests,
+eating their passing bread.
+
+A handful of some of the green things of winter lay before her
+picture: holly boughs with their bold, upright red berries; a spray of
+the cedar of the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous blue. When
+he had come in from out of doors to go on with his work, he had put
+them there--perhaps as some tribute. After all his years with her,
+many and strong, he must have acquired various tributes and
+interpretations; but to-day, during his walk in the woods, it had
+befallen him to think of her as holly which ripens amid snows and
+retains its brave freshness on a landscape of departed things. As
+cedar also which everywhere on the Shield is the best loved of
+forest-growths to be the companion of household walls; so that even
+the poorest of the people, if it does not grow near the spot they
+build in, hunt for it and bring it home: everywhere wife and cedar,
+wife and cedar, wife and cedar.
+
+The photographs of the children grouped on each side of hers with
+heads a little lower down called up memories of Old World pictures in
+which cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet of the heavenly Hebrew
+maid. Glowing young American mother with four healthy children as her
+gifts to the nation--this was the practical thought of her that
+riveted and held.
+
+As has been said, they were in two groups, the children; a boy and
+girl in each. The four were of nearly the same age; but the faces of
+two were on a dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced at her again
+and persuaded yourself that the expression of motherhood which
+characterized her separated into two expressions (as behind a thin
+white cloud it is possible to watch another cloud of darker
+hue). Nearer in time was the countenance of a mother happy with happy
+offspring; further away the same countenance withdrawn a little into
+shadow--the face of the mother bereaved--mute and changeless.
+
+The man, the worker, whom this little flock of wife and two surviving
+children now followed through the world as their leader, sat with his
+face toward his desk In a corner of the room; solidly squared before
+his undertaking, liking it, mastering it; seldom changing his position
+as the minutes passed, never nervously; with a quietude in him that
+was oftener in Southern gentlemen in quieter, more gentlemanly
+times. A low powerful figure with a pair of thick shoulders and
+tremendous limbs; filling the room with his vitality as a heavy
+passionate animal lying in a corner of a cage fills the space of the
+cage, so that you wait for it to roll over or get up on its feet and
+walk about that you may study its markings and get an inkling of its
+conquering nature.
+
+Meantime there were hints of him. When he had come in, he had thrown
+his overcoat on a chair that stood near the table in the centre of the
+room and had dropped his hat upon his coat.  It had slipped to the
+floor and now lay there--a low, soft black hat of a kind formerly much
+worn by young Southerners of the countryside,--especially on occasions
+when there was a spur of heat in their mood and going,--much the same
+kind that one sees on the heads of students in Rome in winter; light,
+warm, shaping itself readily to breezes from any quarter, to be doffed
+or donned as comfortable and negligible. It suggested that he had been
+a country boy in the land, still belonged to the land, and as a man
+kept to its out-of-door habits and fashions. His shoes, one of which
+you saw at each side of his chair, were especially well made for
+rough-going feet to tramp in during all weathers.
+
+A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped to withdraw your
+interpretation of him from farm life to the arts or the
+professions. The scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing against
+the clear-hued flesh at the back of his neck, and the Van Dyck-like
+edge of the shirt cuff, defining his powerful wrist and hand,
+strengthened the notion that he belonged to the arts or to the
+professions. He might have been sitting before a canvas instead of a
+desk and holding a brush instead of a pen: the picture would have been
+true to life. Or truer yet, he might have taken his place with the
+grave group of students in the Lesson in Anatomy left by Rembrandt.
+
+Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair about, and began to read
+the page he had just finished: then you saw him. He had a big,
+masculine, solid-cut, self-respecting, normal-looking, executive
+head--covered with thick yellowish hair clipped short; so that while
+everything else in his appearance indicated that he was in the prime
+of manhood, the clipped hair caused him to appear still more youthful;
+and it invested him with a rustic atmosphere which went along very
+naturally with the sentimental country hat and the all-weather
+shoes. He seemed at first impression a magnificent animal frankly
+loved of the sun--perhaps too warmly. The sun itself seemed to have
+colored for him his beard and mustache--a characteristic hue of men's
+hair and beard in this land peopled from Old English stock. The beard,
+like the hair, was cut short, as though his idea might have been to
+get both hair and beard out of life's daily way; but his mustache
+curled thickly down over his mouth, hiding it. In the whole effect
+there was a suggestion of the Continent, perhaps of a former student
+career in Germany, memories of which may still have lasted with him
+and the marks of which may have purposely been kept up in his
+appearance.
+
+But such a fashion of beard, while covering a man's face, does much to
+uncover the man. As he sat amid his papers and books, your thought
+surely led again to old pictures where earnest heads bend together
+over some point on the human road, at which knowledge widens and
+suffering begins to be made more bearable and death more
+kind. Perforce now you interpreted him and fixed his general working
+category: that he was absorbed in work meant to be serviceable to
+humanity. His house, the members of his family, the people of his
+neighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere dweller on
+his farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the race
+forever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows.
+
+He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped its
+responsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests.
+The look of the student left his face; over it began to play the soft
+lights of the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for his
+own place in the world; the student had become the husband and
+house-father. A few moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his work
+again, his right hand took up the pen, his left hand went back to the
+pictures.
+
+The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he were
+being watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed.
+(He had the reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that he
+is idolized.)
+
+Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immense
+oak tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminder
+of vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, the
+straining and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcries
+for the wild life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, an
+image of forest reflection.  Once a small black-and-white sapsucker,
+circling the trunk and peering into the crevices of the bark on a
+level with the windows, uttered minute notes which penetrated into the
+room like steel darts of sound. A snowbird alighted on the
+window-sill, glanced familiarly in at the man, and shot up its crest;
+but disappointed perhaps that it was not noticed, quoted its resigned
+gray phrase--a phrase it had made for itself to accompany the score of
+gray whiter--and flitted on billowy wings to a juniper at the corner
+of the house, its turret against the long javelins of the North.
+
+Amid the stillness of Nature outside and the house-silence of a love
+guarding him within, the man worked on.
+
+A little clock ticked independently on the old-fashioned Parian marble
+mantelpiece. Prints were propped against its sides and face,
+illustrating the use of trees about ancient tombs and temples.  Out of
+this photographic grove of dead things the uncaring clock threw out
+upon the air a living three--the fateful three that had been measured
+for each tomb and temple in its own land and time.
+
+A knock, regretful but positive, was heard, and the door opening into
+the hall was quietly pushed open. A glow lit up the student's face
+though he did not stop writing; and his voice, while it gave a
+welcome, unconsciously expressed regret at being disturbed:
+
+"Come in."
+
+"I am in!"
+
+He lifted his heavy figure with instant courtesy--rather obsolete
+now--and bowing to one side, sat down again.
+
+"So I see," he said, dipping his pen into his ink.
+
+"Since you did not turn around, you would better have said 'So I
+hear.' It is three o'clock."
+
+"So I hear."
+
+"You said you would be ready."
+
+"I am ready."
+
+"You said you would be done."
+
+"I am done--nearly done."
+
+"How nearly?"
+
+"By to-morrow--to-morrow afternoon before dark. I have reached the
+end, but now it is hard to stop, hard to let go."
+
+His tone gave first place, primary consideration, to his work. The
+silence in the room suddenly became charged. When the voice was heard
+again, there was constraint in it:
+
+"There is something to be done this afternoon before dark, something I
+have a share in. Having a share, I am interested. Being interested, I
+am prompt. Being prompt, I am here."
+
+He waved his hand over the written sheets before him--those cold Alps
+of learning; and asked reproachfully:
+
+"Are you not interested in all this, O you of little faith?"
+
+"How can I say, O me of little knowledge!"
+
+As the words impulsively escaped, he heard a quick movement behind
+him. He widened out his heavy arms upon his manuscript and looked back
+over his shoulder at her and laughed. And still smiling and holding
+his pen between his fingers, he turned and faced her. She had advanced
+into the middle of the room and had stopped at the chair on which he
+had thrown his overcoat and hat. She had picked up the hat and stood
+turning it and pushing its soft material back into shape for his
+head--without looking at him.
+
+The northern light of the winter afternoon, entering through the
+looped crimson-damask curtains, fell sidewise upon the woman of the
+picture.
+
+Years had passed since the picture had been made. There were changes
+in her; she looked younger. She had effaced the ravages of a sadder
+period of her life as human voyagers upon reaching quiet port repair
+the damages of wandering and storm. Even the look of motherhood, of
+the two motherhoods, which so characterized her in the photograph, had
+disappeared for the present.  Seeing her now for the first time, one
+would have said that her whole mood and bearing made a single
+declaration: she was neither wife nor mother; she was a woman in love
+with life's youth--with youth--youth; in love with the things that
+youth alone could ever secure to her.
+
+The carriage of her beautiful head, brave and buoyant, brought before
+you a vision of growing things in nature as they move towards their
+summer yet far away. There still was youth in the round white throat
+above the collar of green velvet--woodland green--darker than the
+green of the cloth she wore. You were glad she had chosen that color
+because she was going for a walk with him; and green would enchain the
+eye out on the sere ground and under the stripped trees. The
+flecklessness of her long gloves drew your thoughts to winter
+rather--to its one beauteous gift dropped from soiled clouds. A
+slender toque brought out the keenness in the oval of her face.  From
+it rose one backward-sweeping feather of green shaded to coral at the
+tip; and there your fancy may have cared to see lingering the last
+radiance of whiter-sunset skies.
+
+He kept his seat with his back to the manuscript from which he had
+repulsed her; and his eyes swept loyally over her as she
+waited. Though she could scarcely trust herself to speak, still less
+could she endure the silence. With her face turned toward the windows
+opening on the lawn, she stretched out her arm toward him and softly
+shook his hat at him.
+
+"The sun sets--you remember how many minutes after four," she said,
+with no other tone than that of quiet warning. "I marked the minutes
+in the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone to
+bed, so that you would not forget. You know how short the twilights
+are even when the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will not
+be any twilight. The children said they would not be at home until
+after dark, but they may come sooner; it may be a trick. They have
+threatened to catch us this year in one way or another, and you know
+they must not do that--not this year! There must be one more Christmas
+with all its old ways--even if it must be without its old mysteries."
+
+He did not reply at once and then not relevantly:
+
+"I heard you playing."
+
+He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under his
+brows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for she
+held her face averted.
+
+The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater
+constraint in her voice when it was next heard:
+
+"I had to play; you need not have listened."
+
+"I had to listen; you played loud--"
+
+"I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown
+other sounds," she admitted.
+
+"What other sounds?" His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it
+was a frank thrust into the unknown.
+
+"Discords--possibly."
+
+"What discords?" His thrust became deeper.
+
+She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across
+her lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish.
+
+But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hidden
+trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished,
+radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a
+blaze of sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the
+advancing Figure of Joy.
+
+It was the whole familiar picture of him now--triumphantly painted in
+the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords--that
+drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the
+self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near
+losing; and her words issued from behind the closed gates--as through
+a crevice of the closed gates:
+
+"I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep
+grave ones you sent for.  It is written by a deep grave German, and it
+is worked out in the deep grave German way.  The whole purpose of it
+is to show that any woman in the life of any man is merely--an
+Incident.  She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a
+briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, at
+bottom, she is to him--an Incident."
+
+He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened.
+
+"Were those the discords?" he asked gently.
+
+She did not reply.
+
+He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised
+his arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of
+magazines on top of his desk.
+
+"Here is a work," he said, "not written by a German or by any other
+man, but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole
+purpose of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the
+life of any woman.  He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for
+a briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end,
+beneath everything else, he is to her--an Incident."
+
+He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his
+eyes.
+
+"That did not trouble me," he said tenderly.  "Those were not discords
+to me."
+
+Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no
+comment.
+
+His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to
+whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he
+turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself
+from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness:
+
+"Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a year
+now I have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and at
+this work--without any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurred
+before in our lives. You have shared everything. I have relied upon
+you and I have needed you, and you have never failed me. And this
+apparently has been your reward--to be rudely shut out at last.  Now
+you come in and I tell you that the work is done--quite
+finished--without a word to you about it. Do I not understand?" he
+repeated.  "Have I not understood all along? It is true; outwardly as
+regards this work you have been--the Incident."
+
+As he paused, she made a slight gesture with one hand as though she
+did not care for what he was saying and brushed away the fragile web
+of his words from before her eyes--eyes fixed on larger things lying
+clear before her in life's distance.
+
+He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:
+
+"But, comrade of all these years, battler with me for life's
+victories, did you think you were never to know? Did you believe I was
+never to explain? You had only one more day to wait!  If patience, if
+faith, could only have lasted another twenty-four hours--until
+Christmas Eve!"
+
+It was the first time for nearly a year that the sound of those words
+had been heard in that house.  He bent earnestly over toward her; he
+leaned heavily forward with his hands on his knees and searched her
+features with loyal chiding.
+
+"Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?" he asked, "its secrets for you
+and me? Think of Christmas Eve for you and me! Remember!"
+
+Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a
+woodchopper's smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about
+the hidden life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmosphere
+near by is clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender
+haze of old pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred.
+
+He noted the effect of his words and did not wait. He turned to his
+desk and, gathering up the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to
+cover her picture with them.
+
+"Stay blinded and bewildered there," he said, "until the hour comes
+when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand;
+you will then see whether in this work you have been--the Incident."
+
+Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter
+afternoon had perceptibly waned in the room.
+
+She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were
+tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up
+between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.
+
+"It is getting late," she said in nearly the same tone of quiet
+warning with which she had spoken before. "There is no time to lose."
+
+He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its
+interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of
+her arms, looking at her reverently.
+
+But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides--the
+hands that were life, the arms that were love.
+
+She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward
+over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache.
+Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly
+on his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put
+out one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile
+over her shoulder to him:
+
+"Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?" she asked,
+with a struggling sweetness in her voice.
+
+He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve
+with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the
+collar:
+
+"I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books."
+
+"The trouble is," she replied, "the trouble is that the authors are
+right and the books are right: men and women _are_ only Incidents
+to each other in life," and she passed out into the hall.
+
+"Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the
+universe," he replied, "if we cared to look at it in that way; but
+we'd better not!"
+
+He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly
+stopped buttoning his overcoat.  His eyes began to wander over the
+books, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey
+everything that he had brought together from such distances of place
+and time. His work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of
+loneliness, came over him as it comes upon all of us who reach the
+happy ending of toil that we have put our heart and strength in.
+
+"Are you coming?" she called faintly from the hall.
+
+"I am coming," he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he
+stopped again and looked back.
+
+Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was
+on the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers
+who join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment
+that through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which
+men--like a crew of sailors--tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow
+her into some divine haven.
+
+His task was ended. Would it be of service?  Would it carry any
+message? Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth,
+with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable
+children of the future the better for its shining?
+
+"Are you coming?" she called more quiveringly.
+
+"I am coming," he called back, breaking away from his revery, and
+raising his voice so it would surely reach her.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+
+
+She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the
+short frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting
+to be joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed
+on the doorway for his emerging figure.
+
+"To-morrow night," he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his
+words, "to-morrow night you will understand."
+
+"Yes," she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers,
+"to-morrow night I must understand.  Until to-morrow night, then,
+blinded and bewildered with holly and cedar let me be!  Kind
+ignorance, enfold me and spare me! All happiness that I can control or
+conjecture, come to me and console me!"
+
+And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he
+should step forth.
+
+It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what
+they had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind,
+and the whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no
+movement. Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the
+winter land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
+
+The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and
+beyond the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the
+distance you distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-grass
+pastures: white ash and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut
+and black walnut; and the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the
+sycamore with her soft leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the
+hickory brought to mind autumn days when children were abroad,
+ploughing the myriad leaves with booted feet and gathering their
+harvest of nuts--primitive food-storing instinct of the human animal
+still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts to be put away in garret
+and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas came.
+
+Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of
+an axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it
+would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of
+the forest mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be
+gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house.  Near by was a thicket
+of bramble and cane where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly
+thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.
+
+Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield.  The corn had just
+been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears
+ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly
+to remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a
+genial torrent through all days and nights of the year--many a
+full-throated rill--but never with so inundating a movement as at this
+season.  And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all
+farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on
+posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black
+rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor
+over well-chosen chips.
+
+Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled,
+rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.
+
+On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble
+of which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness
+for the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the
+drills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn
+aftermath.
+
+Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where
+hemp-breakers were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks
+wagons loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to
+the towns, helping to fill the farmer's pockets with holiday largess.
+
+Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the
+mistletoe--the holly--the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty
+men--the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives--the turkey
+and the quail--and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sight
+there--the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into
+offerings to the dark solstice, the low activities of the soil
+uplifted to human joyance.
+
+One last thing completed the picture of the scene.
+
+The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day
+and lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive
+verdure.  Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor
+larch nor fir is native to these portions of the Shield; only the wild
+cedar, the shapeless and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage
+of evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had
+been planted.
+
+It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their note
+of deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape
+this dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky they
+waited in beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and spruce
+which seems always to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; the
+dim blue-gray of pines which rather belongs to far-vaulted summer
+skies; and the dark green of firs--true comfortable winter coat when
+snows sift mournfully and icicles are spearing earthward.
+
+These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished the
+picture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied
+no appetite, they were ministers to no passions; but with them the
+Christmas of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape their
+boughs with its gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires the
+spiritual hope of humanity would take its flight toward the eternal.
+
+Thus then the winter land waited for the oncoming of that strange
+travelling festival of the world which has roved into it and encamped
+gypsy-like from old lost countries: the festival that takes toll of
+field and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup and loaf; but that, best of
+all, wrings from the nature of man its reluctant tenderness for his
+fellows and builds out of his lonely doubts regarding this life his
+faith in a better one.
+
+And central on this whole silent scene--the highest element in it--its
+one winter-red passion flower--the motionless woman waiting outside
+the house.
+
+At last he came out upon the step.
+
+He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though his first thought were
+of what the weather was going to be. Then as he buttoned the top
+button of his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down over it to
+make it more comfortable under his short neck, with his other hand he
+gave a little pull at his hat--the romantic country hat; and he peeped
+out from under the rustic brim at her, smiling with old gayeties and
+old fondnesses. He bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked so
+short under the flat headgear that her first thought was how slight a
+disguise every year turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and she
+smiled back at him with the same gayeties and fondnesses of days gone
+by. But such a deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and walked
+hurriedly down the hill toward the evergreens.
+
+He was quickly at her side. She could feel how animal youth in him
+released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was
+brutal vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as
+his overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping
+out of life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down
+the lawn he halted and laid his hand heavily on her wrist.
+
+"Listen to that!" he said. His voice was eager, excited, like a boy's.
+
+On the opposite side of the house, several hundred yards away, the
+country turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them the
+rumbling of many vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of the
+nearest town and moving toward smaller villages scattered over the
+country; to its hamlets and cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer
+or poorer--every vehicle Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of the
+Southern Yule-tide. There were matters and usages in those American
+carriages and buggies and wagons and carts the history of which went
+back to the England of the Georges and the Stuarts and the Henrys; to
+the England of Elizabeth, to the England of Chaucer; back through
+robuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred, and on beyond
+this till they were lost under the forest glooms of Druidical Britain.
+
+They stood looking into each other's eyes and gathering into their
+ears the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it all
+meant--this far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they saw
+the whole picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: the
+atmosphere of it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouring
+from its chimneys, so that twilight in it had already begun to fall
+ahead of twilight out in the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along
+the little streets, and shops to be illuminated to the delight of
+window-gazing, mystery-loving children--wild with their holiday
+excitements and secrecies.  Somewhere in the throng their own two
+children were busy unless they had already started home.
+
+For years he had held a professorship in the college in this town,
+driving in and out from his home; but with the close of this academic
+year he was to join the slender file of Southern men who have been
+called to Northern universities: this change would mean the end of
+life here. Both thought of this now--of the last Christmas in the
+house; and with the same impulse they turned their gaze back to it.
+
+More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield, a
+writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its
+meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of
+an entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue,
+he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into
+the notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world
+knows it--the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of
+American home life--embodying the very soul of it in the clear amber
+of sound.
+
+This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low,
+old-fashioned, brown-walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneys
+generous, with green window-shutters less than green and white
+window-sills less than white; with feudal vines giving to its walls
+their summery allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in the
+middle years of its strength and its honors; not needy, not wealthy,
+but answering Agar's prayer for neither poverty nor riches.
+
+The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it.
+
+It had been the house of his fathers. He had brought her to it as his
+own on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across the
+country. They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him in
+the carriage, one of his arms around her and his other hand enfolding
+both of hers, she had first caught sight of it through the forest
+trees--waiting for her with its lights just lit, its warmth, its
+privacies: and that had been Christmas Eve!
+
+For her wedding day had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her
+choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she
+had clung to it the more positively.
+
+"It is the most beautiful night of the year!"  she had replied,
+brushing their objection aside with that reason alone. "And it is the
+happiest!  I will be married on that night, when I am happiest!"
+
+Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered other words to
+herself--yet scarce uttered them, rather felt them:
+
+"Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannot
+fail us became human.  My love for him, which is the divine thing in
+my life and which is never to fail him, shall become human to him on
+that night."
+
+When the carriage had stopped at the front porch, he had led her into
+the house between the proud smiling servants of his establishment
+ranged at a respectful distance on each side; and without surrendering
+her even to her maid--a new spirit of silence on him--he had led her
+to her bedroom, to a place on the carpet under the chandelier.
+
+Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in
+her youth and loveliness--_for him;_ come into his house, into
+his arms--_his_; no other's--never while life lasted to be
+another's even in thought or in desire.
+
+Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of
+many had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could
+gather her home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms
+and set upon her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As
+his warm breath broke close against her face, his lips under their
+mustache, almost boyish then, had thoughtlessly formed one little
+phrase--one little but most lasting and fateful phrase:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe_!"
+
+Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of
+mistletoe swung from the chandelier.
+
+Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards
+know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as
+the first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them
+most clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow
+down into the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon
+the life-sap of the tree. And in all the later years they had been the
+green spot of verdure under life's dark skies--the undying bough into
+which the spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"
+
+Through the first problem of learning to weld her nature to his
+wisely; through the perils of bearing children and the agony of seeing
+some of them pass away; through the ambition of having him rise in his
+profession and through the ideal of making his home an earthly
+paradise; through loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he came
+back,--upon her whole life had rested the wintry benediction of that
+mystical phrase:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She turned away now, starting once more downward toward the
+evergreens. He was quickly at her side.
+
+"What do you suppose Harold and Elizabeth are up to about this time?"
+he asked, with a good-humored jerk of his head toward the distant
+town.
+
+"At least to something mischievous, whatever it is," she
+replied. "They begged to be allowed to stay until the shop windows
+were lighted; they have seen the shop windows two or three times
+already this week: there is no great marvel for them now in shop
+windows. Permission to stay late may be a blind to come home
+early. They are determined, from what I have overheard, to put an end
+this year to the parental house mysteries of Christmas. They are
+crossing the boundary between the first childhood and the second. But
+if it be possible, I wish everything to be kept once more just as it
+has always been; let it be so for my sake!"
+
+"And I wish it for your sake," he replied heartily; "and for my
+purposes."
+
+After a moment of silence he asked: "How large a Tree must it be this
+year?"
+
+"It will have to be large," she replied; and she began to count those
+for whom the Tree this year was meant.
+
+First she called the names of the two children they had lost. Gifts
+for these were every year hung on the boughs. She mentioned their
+names now, and then she continued counting:
+
+"Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the family
+come Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor's children.  Then
+the servants--long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow for
+the other children who are to make up the Christmas party: ten
+children have been invited, ten children have accepted, ten children
+will arrive. The ten will bring with them some unimportant parents;
+you can judge."
+
+"That will do for size," he said, laughing.  "Now the kind:
+spruce--larch--hemlock--pine--which shall it be?"
+
+"It shall be none of them!" she answered, after a little waiting. "It
+shall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeer
+are harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts--fir.  The old
+Christmas stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in it
+longest. And deepest mystery darkens the heart of it," she added.
+
+"Fir it shall be!" he said. "Choose the tree."
+
+"I have chosen."
+
+She stopped and delicately touched his wrist with the finger tips of
+one white-gloved hand, bidding him stand beside her.
+
+"That one," she said, pointing down.
+
+The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens in summer gratefully,
+but now lying like a band of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near
+the middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on this
+island, aloof from its fellows and with space for the growth of its
+boughs, stood a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering
+faultlessly, star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered more
+years--a tame dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurred
+with wildness and lapped by low washings of the planet's primeval
+ocean.
+
+At each Christmas for several years they had been tempted to cut this
+tree, but had spared it for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the
+thicket.
+
+"That one," she now said, pointing down.  "This is the last time. Let
+us have the best of things while we may! Is it not always the perfect
+that is demanded for sacrifice?"
+
+His glance had already gone forward eagerly to the tree, and he
+started toward it.
+
+Descending, they stepped across the brook to the island and went up
+close to the fir. With a movement not unobserved by her he held out
+his hand and clasped three green fingers of a low bough which the fir
+seemed to stretch out to him recognizingly. (She had always realized
+the existence of some intimate bond between him and the forest.) His
+face now filled with meanings she did not share; the spell of the
+secret work had followed him out of the house down to the trees;
+incommunicable silence shut him in.  A moment later his fingers parted
+with the green fingers of the fir and he moved away from her side,
+starting around the tree and studying it as though in delight of fresh
+knowledge. So she watched him pass around to the other side.
+
+When he came back where he had started, she was not there. He looked
+around searchingly; her figure was nowhere in sight.
+
+He stood--waiting.
+
+The valley had memories, what memories!  The years came close together
+here; they clustered as thickly as the trees themselves. Vacant spots
+among them marked where the Christmas Trees of former years had been
+cut down. Some of the Trees had been for the two children they had
+lost. This wandering trail led hither and thither back to the first
+Tree for the first child: he had stooped down and cut that close to
+the ground with his mere penknife. When it had been lighted, it had
+held only two or three candles; and the candle on the top of it had
+flared level into the infant's hand-shaded eyes.
+
+He knew that she was making through the evergreens a Pilgrimage of the
+Years, walking there softly and alone with the feet of life's Pities
+and a mother's Constancies.
+
+He waited for her--motionless.
+
+The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley now. Only from the
+trees came the plaintive twittering of birds which had come in from
+frozen weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds of the boughs were
+calling to one another. It was not their song, but their speech; there
+was no love in it, but there was what for them perhaps corresponds to
+our sense of ties. It most resembled in human life the brief things
+that two people, having long lived together, utter to each other when
+together in a room they prepare for the night: there is no
+anticipation; it is a confession of the unconfessed.  About him now
+sounded this low winter music from the far boundary of other lives.
+
+He did not hear it.
+
+The light on the landscape had changed. The sun was setting and a
+splendor began to spread along the sky and across the land. It laid a
+glory on the roof of the house on the hill; it smote the edge of the
+woodland pasture, burnishing with copper the gray domes; it shone
+faintly on distant corn shocks, on the weather-dark tents of the hemp
+at bivouac soldierly and grim. At his feet it sparkled in rose gleams
+on the samite of the brook and threw burning shafts into the gloom of
+the fir beside him.
+
+He did not see it.
+
+He did not hear the calling of the birds about his ears, he did not
+see the sunset before his eyes, he did not feel the fir tree the
+boughs of which stuck against his side.
+
+He stood there as still as a rock--with his secret. Not the secret of
+the year's work, which was to be divulged to his wife and through her
+to the world; but the secret which for some years had been growing in
+his life and which would, he hoped, never grow into the open--to be
+seen of her and of all men.
+
+The sentimental country hat now looked as though it might have been
+worn purposely to help out a disguise, as the more troubled man behind
+the scenes makes up to be the happier clown. It became an absurdity, a
+mockery, above his face grave, stern, set of jaw and eye. He was no
+longer the student buried among his books nor human brother to toiling
+brothers. He had not the slightest thought of service to mankind left
+in him, he was but a man himself with enough to think of in the battle
+between his own will and blood.
+
+And behind him among the dark evergreens went on that Pilgrimage of
+the Years--with the feet of the Pities and the Constancies.
+
+Moments passed; he did not stir. Then there was a slight noise on the
+other side of the tree, and his nature instantly stepped back into his
+outward place. He looked through the boughs. She had returned and was
+standing with her face also turned toward the sunset; it was very
+pale, very still.
+
+Such darkness had settled on the valley now that the green she wore
+blent with the green of the fir. He saw only her white face and her
+white hands so close to the branches that they appeared to rest upon
+them, to grow out of them: he sadly thought of one of his prints of
+Egypt of old and of the Lady of the Sacred Tree. Her long
+backward-sweeping plume of green also blent with the green of the
+fir--shade to shade--and only the coral tip of it remained strongly
+visible. This matched the last coral in the sunset; and it seemed to
+rest ominously above her head as a finger-point of the fading light of
+Nature.
+
+He went quickly around to her. He locked his arms around her and drew
+her close and held her close; and thus for a while the two stood,
+watching the flame on the altar of the world as it sank lower, leaving
+emptiness and ashes.
+
+Once she put out a hand and with a gesture full of majesty and
+nobleness waved farewell to the dying fire.
+
+Still without a word he took his arms from around her and turned
+energetically to the tree.
+
+He pressed the lowest boughs aside and made his way in close to the
+trunk and struck it with a keen stroke.
+
+The fir as he drew the axe out made at its gashed throat a sound like
+that of a butchered, blood-strangled creature trying to cry out too
+late against a treachery. A horror ran through the boughs; the
+thousands of leaves were jarred by the death-strokes; and the top of
+it rocked like a splendid plume too rudely treated in a storm. Then it
+fell over on its side, bridging blackly the white ice of the brook.
+
+Stooping, he lifted it triumphantly. He set the butt-end on one of his
+shoulders and, stretching his arms up, grasped the trunk and held the
+tree straight in the air, so that it seemed to be growing out of his
+big shoulder as out of a ledge of rock.  Then he turned to her and
+laughed out in his strength and youth. She laughed joyously back at
+him, glorying as he did.
+
+With a robust re-shouldering of the tree to make it more comfortable
+to carry, he turned and started up the hill toward the house. As she
+followed behind, the old mystery of the woods seemed at last to have
+taken bodily possession of him. The fir was riding on his shoulder,
+its arms met fondly around his neck, its fingers were caressing his
+hair. And it whispered back jeeringly to her through the twilight:
+
+"Say farewell to him! He was once yours; he is yours no longer. He
+dandles the child of the forest on his shoulder instead of his
+children by you in the house. He belongs to Nature; and as Nature
+calls, he will always follow--though it should lead over the precipice
+or into the flood.  Once Nature called him to you: remember how he
+broke down barriers until he won you. Now he is yours no longer--say
+good-by to him!"
+
+With an imbued terror and desolation, she caught up with him. By a
+movement so soft that he should not be aware, she plucked him by the
+coat sleeve on the other side from the fir and held on to him as he
+strode on in careless joy.
+
+Halfway up the hill lights began to flash from the windows of the
+house: a servant was bringing in the lamps. It was at this hour, in
+just this way, that she had first caught sight of them on that
+Christmas Eve when he had brought her home after the wedding.
+
+She hurried around in front of him, wishing to read the expression of
+his eyes by the distant gleams from the windows. Would they have
+nothing to say to her about those winter twilight lamps? Did he, too,
+not remember?
+
+His head and face were hidden; a thousand small spears of Nature
+bristled between him and her; but he laughed out to her from behind
+the rampart of the green spears.
+
+At that moment a low sound in the distance drew her attention, and
+instantly alert she paused to listen. Then, forgetting everything
+else, she called to him with a rush of laughter like that of her
+mischief-loving girlhood:
+
+"Quick! There they are! I heard the gate shut at the turnpike! They
+must not catch us!  Quick! Quick!"
+
+"Hurry, then!" he cried, as he ran forward, joining his laughter to
+hers. "Open the door for me!"
+
+After this the night fell fast. The only sounds to be heard in the
+valley were the minute readjustments of the ice of the brook as it
+froze tighter and the distressed cries of the birds that had roosted
+in the fir.
+
+So the Tree entered the house.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+
+
+During the night it turned bitter cold.  When morning came the sky was
+a turquoise and the wind a gale.  The sun seemed to give out light but
+not heat--to lavish its splendor but withhold its charity. Moist flesh
+if it chanced to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter land
+the tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece of greased metal used as
+a trap and is caught and held there until the trapper returns or until
+it starves--starves with food on its tongue.
+
+The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farmhand struck it, resisted
+as rock. In the fetlocks of farm horses, as they moved shivering,
+balls of ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little roughnesses of
+woodland paths snapped off beneath the slow-searching hoofs of
+fodder-seeking cattle like points of glass.
+
+Within their wool the sheep were comforted.
+
+On higher fields which had given back their moisture to the atmosphere
+and now were dry, the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals and
+dragged it away in flaunting yellow veils. The picture it made, being
+so ill-seasoned, led you to think of August drought when the
+grasshopper stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is hot
+in the nostrils and every bird holds its beak open and its wings
+lifted like cooling lattices alongside its breast. In these veils of
+dust swarms of frost crystals sported--dead midgets of the dead
+North. Except crystal and dust and wind, naught moved out there; no
+field mouse, no hare nor lark nor little shielded dove. In the naked
+trees of the pasture the crow kept his beak as unseen as the owl's;
+about the cedars of the yard no scarlet feather warmed the day.
+
+The house on the hill--one of the houses whose spirit had been blown
+into the amber of the poet's song--sent festal smoke out of its
+chimneys all day long. At intervals the radiant faces of children
+appeared at the windows, hanging wreaths of evergreens; or their
+figures flitted to and fro within as they wove garlands on the walls
+for the Christmas party. At intervals some servant with head and
+shoulders muffled in a bright-colored shawl darted trippingly from the
+house to the cabins in the yard and from the cabins back to the
+house--the tropical African's polar dance between fire and fire. By
+every sign it gave the house showed that it was marshalling its whole
+happiness.
+
+One thing only seemed to make a signal of distress from afar. The oak
+tree beside the house, whose roots coiled warmly under the
+hearth-stones and whose boughs were outstretched across the roof,
+seemed to writhe and rock in its winter sleep with murmurings and
+tossings like a human dreamer trying to get rid of an unhappy dream.
+Imagination might have said that some darkest tragedy of forests long
+since gone still lived in this lone survivor--that it struggled to
+give up the grief and guilt of an ancient forest shame.
+
+The weather moderated in the afternoon. A warm current swept across
+the upper atmosphere, developing everywhere behind it a cloud; and
+toward sundown out of this cloud down upon the Shield snow began to
+fall. Not the large wet flakes which sometimes descend too late in
+spring upon the buds of apple orchards; nor those mournfuller ones
+which drop too soon on dim wild violets in November woods, but winter
+snow, stern sculptor of Arctic solitudes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all over the Shield.
+
+Softly the snow fell upon the year's footprints and pathways of
+children and upon schoolhouses now closed and riotously deserted. More
+softly upon too crowded asylums for them: houses of noonday darkness
+where eyes eagerly look out at the windows but do not see; houses of
+soundlessness where ears listen and do not hear any noise; houses of
+silence where lips try to speak but utter no word.
+
+The snow of Christmas Eve was falling softly on the old: whose eyes
+are always seeing vanished faces, whose ears hear voices gentler than
+any the earth now knows, whose hands forever try to reach other hands
+vainly held out to them.  Sad, sad to those who remember loved ones
+gone with their kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve!
+
+But sadder yet for those who live on together after kindnesses have
+ceased, or whose love went like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve to
+them! Dark its snow and blinding!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was late that night.
+
+She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a shaded lamp--the only
+light in the room. Her face, always calm in life's wisdom, but
+agitated now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in toward her,
+rested clear-cut upon the darkness.
+
+She placed the lamp on a table near the door and seated herself beside
+it. But she pushed the lamp away unconsciously as though the light of
+the house were no longer her light; and she sat in the chair as though
+it were no longer her chair; and she looked about the room as though
+it were no longer hers nor the house itself nor anything else that she
+cared for most.
+
+Earlier in the evening they had finished hanging the presents on the
+Tree; but then an interruption had followed: the children had broken
+profanely in upon them, rending the veil of the house mysteries; and
+for more than an hour the night had been given up to them. Now the
+children were asleep upstairs, already dreaming of Christmas Morn and
+the rush for the stockings. The servants had finished their work and
+were gone to their quarters out in the yard. The doors of the house
+were locked. There would be no more intrusion now, no possible
+interruption; all the years were to meet him and her--alone. For Life
+is the master dramatist: when its hidden tragedies are ready to utter
+themselves, everything superfluous quits the stage; it is the
+essential two who fill it! And how little the rest of the world ever
+hears of what takes place between the two!
+
+A little while before he had left the room with the step-ladder; when
+he came back, he was to bring with him the manuscript--the silent
+snowfall of knowledge which had been deepening about him for a
+year. The time had already passed for him to return, but he did not
+come. Was there anything in the forecast of the night that made him
+falter? Was he shrinking--_him_ shrink? She put away the thought
+as a strange outbreak of injustice.
+
+How still it was outside the house with the snow falling! How still
+within! She began to hear the ticking of the tranquil old clock under
+the stairway out in the hall--always tranquil, always tranquil. And
+then she began to listen to the disordered strokes of her own
+heart--that red Clock in the body's Tower whose beats are sent outward
+along the streets and alleys of the blood; whose law it is to be
+alternately wound too fast by the fingers of Joy, too slow by the
+fingers of Sorrow; and whose fate, if it once run down, never
+afterwards either by Joy or Sorrow to be made to run again.
+
+At last she could hear the distant door of his study open and close
+and his steps advance along the hall. With what a splendid swing and
+tramp he brought himself toward her!--with what self-unconsciousness
+and virile strength in his feet!  His steps entered and crossed his
+bedroom, entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he stood there
+before her in the parlor doorway, a few yards off--stopped and
+regarded her intently, smiling.
+
+In a moment she realized what had delayed him. When he had gone away
+with the step-ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behind
+locked doors, he had been working all the afternoon at the decorations
+of the Tree. Now he came back ceremoniously dressed; the rest of the
+night was to be in her honor.
+
+It had always been so on this anniversary of their bridal night. They
+had always dressed for it; the children now in their graves had been
+dressed for it; the children in bed upstairs were regularly dressed
+for it; the house was dressed for it; the servants were dressed for
+it; the whole life of that establishment had always been made to feel
+by honors and tendernesses and gayeties that this was the night on
+which he had married her and brought her home.
+
+As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as never before how these
+anniversaries had not taken his youth away, but had added youth to
+him; he had grown like the evergreen in the middle of the room--with
+increase of trunk and limbs and with larger tides of strength surging
+through him toward the master sun. There were no ravages of married
+life in him. Time had merely made the tree more of a tree and made his
+youth more youth.
+
+She took in momentary details of his appearance: a moisture like
+summer heat along the edge of his yellow hair, started by the bath
+into which he had plunged; the freshness of the enormous hands holding
+the manuscript; the muscle of the forearm bulging within the
+dress-coat sleeve.  Many a time she had wondered how so perfect an
+animal as he had ever climbed to such an elevation of work; and then
+had wondered again whether any but such an animal ever in life does so
+climb--shouldering along with him the poise and breadth of health and
+causing the hot sun of the valley to shine on the mountain tops.
+
+Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed in her honor, thus
+but the larger youth after all their years together, would return her
+greeting with a light in his eyes that had always made them so
+beautiful to her--a light burning as at a portal opening inward for
+her only.
+
+His eyes rested on his manuscript.
+
+He brought it wrapped and tied in the true holiday spirit--sprigs of
+cedar and holly caught in the ribands; and he now lifted and held it
+out to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems.  Then he
+stepped forward and put it on the table at her elbow.
+
+"For you!" he said reverently, stepping back.
+
+There had been years when, returning from a tramp across the country,
+he would bring her perhaps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or a
+brilliant autumn leaf for her throat.
+
+"For you!" he would say; and then, before he could give it to her, he
+would throw it away and take her in his arms. Afterwards she would
+pick up the trifle and treasure it.
+
+"For you!" he now said, offering her the treasure of his year's toil
+and stepping back.
+
+So the weight of the gift fell on her heart like a stone. She did not
+look at it or touch it but glanced up at him. He raised his finger,
+signalling for silence; and going to the chimney corner, brought back
+a long taper and held it over the lamp until it ignited. Then with a
+look which invited her to follow, he walked to the Tree and began to
+light the candles.
+
+He began at the lowest boughs and, passing around, touched them one by
+one. Around and around he went, and higher and higher twinkled the
+lights as they mounted the tapering sides of the fir. At the top he
+kindled one highest red star, shining down on everything below. Then
+he blew out the taper, turned out the lamp; and returning to the tree,
+set the heavy end of the taper on the floor and grasped it midway, as
+one might lightly hold a stout staff.
+
+The room, lighted now by the common glow of the candles, revealed
+itself to be the parlor of the house elaborately decorated for the
+winter festival.  Holly wreaths hung in the windows; the walls were
+garlanded; evergreen boughs were massed above the window cornices; on
+the white lace of window curtains many-colored autumn leaves, pressed
+and kept for this night, looked as though they had been blown there
+scatteringly by October winds. The air of the room was heavy with
+odors; there was summer warmth in it.
+
+In the middle of the room stood the fir tree itself, with its top
+close to the ceiling and its boughs stretched toward the four walls of
+the room impartially--as symbolically to the four corners of the
+earth. It would be the only witness of all that was to take place
+between them: what better could there be than this messenger of
+silence and wild secrecy? From the mountains and valleys of the planet
+its race had looked out upon a million generations of men and women;
+and the calmness of its lot stretched across the turbulence of human
+passion as an ancient bridge spans a modern river.
+
+At the apex of the Tree a star shone. Just beneath at the first
+forking of the boughs a candle burned. A little lower down a cross
+gleamed.  Under the cross a white dove hung poised, its pinions
+outstretched as though descending out of the infinite upon some
+earthly object below.  From many of the branches tiny bells swung.
+There were little horns and little trumpets.  Other boughs sagged
+under the weight of silvery cornucopias. Native and tropical fruits
+were tied on here and there; and dolls were tied on also with cords
+around their necks, their feet dangling.  There were smiling masks,
+like men beheaded and smiling in their death. Near the base of the
+Tree there was a drum. And all over the Tree from pinnacle to base
+glittered a tinsel like golden fleece--looking as the moss of old
+Southern trees seen at yellow sunset.
+
+He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation of it. This year at his
+own request the decorations had been left wholly to him; now he seemed
+satisfied.
+
+He turned to her eagerly.
+
+"Do you remember what took place on Christmas Eve last year?" he
+asked, with a reminiscent smile. "You sat where you are sitting and I
+stood where I am standing. After I had finished lighting the Tree, do
+you remember what you said?"
+
+After a moment she stirred and passed her fingers across her brows.
+
+"Recall it to me," she answered. "I must have said many things. I did
+not know that I had said anything that would be remembered a year.
+Recall it to me."
+
+"You looked at the Tree and said what a mystery it is. When and where
+did it begin, how and why?--this Tree that is now nourished in the
+affections of the human family round the world."
+
+"Yes; I remember that."
+
+"I resolved to find out for you. I determined to prepare during what
+hours I could spare from my regular college work the gratification of
+your wish for you as a gift from me. If I could myself find the way
+back through the labyrinth of ages, then I would return for you and
+lead you back through the story of the Christmas Tree as that story
+has never been seen by any one else. All this year's work, then, has
+been the threading of the labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again,
+my work is finished, my gift to you is ready."
+
+He made this announcement and stopped, leaving it to clear the air of
+mystery--the mystery of the secret work.
+
+Then he resumed: "Have you, then, been the Incident in this toil as
+yesterday you intimated that you were? Do you now see that you have
+been the whole reason of it? You were excluded from any share in the
+work only because you could not help to prepare your own gift! That is
+all. What has looked like a secret in this house has been no
+secret. You are blinded and bewildered no longer; the hour has come
+when holly and cedar can speak for themselves."
+
+Sunlight broke out all over his face.
+
+She made no reply but said within herself:
+
+"Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has nothing to do with the
+trouble. The secret of the house is not a misunderstanding; it is
+life. It is not the doing of a year; it is the undoing of the
+years. It is not a gift to enrich me with new happiness; it is a
+lesson that leaves me poorer."
+
+He went on without pausing:
+
+"It is already late. The children interrupted us and took up part of
+your evening. But it is not too late for me to present to you some
+little part of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a short story
+out of the long one. The whole long story is there," he added,
+directing his eyes toward the manuscript at her elbow; and his voice
+showed how he felt a scholar's pride in it.  "From you it can pass out
+to the world that celebrates Christmas and that often perhaps asks the
+same question: What is the history of the Christmas Tree? But now my
+story for you!"
+
+"Wait a moment," she said, rising. She left the package where it was;
+and with feet that trembled against the soft carpet crossed the room
+and seated herself at one end of a deep sofa.
+
+Gathering her dignity about her, she took there the posture of a
+listener--listening at her ease.
+
+The sofa was of richly carved mahogany.  Each end curved into a scroll
+like a landward wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms rested on
+one of the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small table
+on which stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it
+profuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They were one of her
+favorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her this
+afternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen
+messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down the
+wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back
+were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of the sofa her piano
+stood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to him, or played
+with thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music also which
+she many a time read; as Beethoven's Great Nine.
+
+Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to window
+curtain there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put there
+by the children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoon
+they had fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree
+felled the day before--they knowing nothing, happy children!
+
+There she reclined.
+
+The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness over
+which points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in some
+too warm a night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and the
+blackness of her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare arms
+and shoulders and faultless neck and faultless throat bared also. Not
+far away was hid the warm foam-white thigh, curved like Venus's of old
+out of the sea's inaccessible purity. About her wrists garlands of old
+family corals were clasped--the ocean's roses; and on her breast,
+between the night of her gown and the dawn of the flesh, coral buds
+flowered in beauty that could never be opened, never be rifled.
+
+When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two aged
+house-dogs--setters with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle
+breeding--had followed her and lain down at her feet; and one with a
+thrust of his nose pushed her skirts back from the toe of her slipper
+and rested his chin on it.
+
+"I will listen," she said, shrinking as yet from other speech. "I wish
+simply to listen. There will be time enough afterwards for what I have
+to say."
+
+"Then I shall go straight through," he replied.  "One minute now while
+I put together the story for you: it is hard to make a good short
+story out of so vast a one."
+
+During these moments of waiting she saw a new picture of him. Under
+stress of suffering and excitement discoveries denied to calmer hours
+often arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a shock that
+causes it to yawn and open its abysses: at the bottom we see new
+things: sometimes creating new happiness; sometimes old happiness is
+taken away.
+
+As he stood there--the man beside the Tree--into the picture entered
+three other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on the
+walls.
+
+One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale the
+mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the
+reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central
+portions where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the
+rocks: Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing
+and fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and
+children. With his passion for the wilderness--its game, enemies,
+campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely,
+stern, gaunt face, no modern expression in it whatsoever--the timeless
+face of the woods.
+
+Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of the
+family. This man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi the
+central counties; and wherever his power had reached, he had used it
+on a great scale for the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer,
+field-maker; working to bring in the period on the Shield when the
+hand of a man began to grasp the plough instead of the rifle, when the
+stallion had replaced the stag, and bellowing cattle wound fatly down
+into the pastures of the bison. This man had the face of his
+caste--the countenance of the Southern slave-holding feudal lord. Not
+the American face, but the Southern face of a definite era--less than
+national, less than modern; a face not looking far in any direction
+but at things close around.
+
+From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with his
+contemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of the
+Shield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie with
+remnants of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near this
+house. This immediate forefather bore the countenance that began to
+develop in the Northerner and in the Southerner after the Civil War:
+not the Northern look nor the Southern look, but the American look--a
+new thing in the American face, indefinable but unmistakable.
+
+These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of
+the line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of
+them in his own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the
+woods as an implement. In his own case, the woods around him having
+disappeared, the ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry.
+
+The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern
+forestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professorship
+his original researches in this field began to attract attention.
+These had to do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation to
+South Appalachian civilization and thus to that of the continent.
+
+This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from his
+own college and country to a Northern university.
+
+Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of an
+ancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into
+that of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into the
+modern American face unlike any other; now finally in him the national
+American look had broadened into something more modern still--the look
+of mere humanity: he did not look like an American--he looked like a
+man in the service of mankind.
+
+This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself to
+her as one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how the
+past had swept him along with its current; and of how the future now
+caught him up and bore him on, part in its problems. The old passion
+living on in him--forest life; a new passion born in him--human
+life. And by inexorable logic these two now blending themselves
+to-night in a story of the Christmas Tree.
+
+But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces something
+intensely personal to which she could cling; and she did it in this
+wise.
+
+In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they would
+go out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; she
+leading him this way and that way and laying upon him beautiful
+exactions and tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not do
+this and not do that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave.
+
+Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her down
+the lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summer
+evening woods; and there on the roots of some old tree--the shadows of
+the forest behind them and the light of the western sky in their
+faces--they would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes from
+each other.
+
+The burning horizon became a cathedral interior--the meeting of love's
+holiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil upon
+the low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses and
+turf of the Shield under them. The warmth of his body was as the day's
+sunlight stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like its
+tawny bloom, native to the sun.
+
+Life with him was enchanted madness.
+
+He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write on
+the air of the room.  Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his
+classroom when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standing
+at the blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of his
+lecture for the students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as he
+finished each word, he read it aloud to her:
+
+"A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK"
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+
+
+"Josephine!"
+
+He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of it
+float over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls of
+the room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication.
+
+Then he began:
+
+"Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a spring
+morning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. I
+have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question the
+blossoms in your questioning way--you who are always wishing to probe
+the heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of their
+significance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragrant
+trumpets could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It was
+where the filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of a
+dead past that you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces of
+their philosophy.
+
+"So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modern
+man to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of
+the vine; the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach of
+life; and the point where it clamors for satisfaction is at the
+greatest possible distance from its birthplace. For all these
+instincts send their roots down through the mould of the uncivilized,
+down through the mould of the primitive, down into the mould of the
+underhuman--that ancient playhouse dedicated to low tragedies.
+
+"While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of the
+story, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are to
+ourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kind
+of father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beings
+we are to our fellow beings--the passions which swell as with sap the
+buds of those relations until they burst into their final shapes of
+conduct are fed from the bottom of the world's mould.  You and I
+to-night are building the structures of our moral characters upon
+life-piles that sink into fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our
+drinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majestically towards the sea
+and catch drops trickling from the springs of creation.
+
+"It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that
+my story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human
+nature as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have
+wrested it from this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house
+on this Night of the Nativity."
+
+He made the scholar's pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy
+narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling
+the story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid
+Alpine snows.
+
+He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of
+the human race is the sea.  It is true that man in some ancestral form
+was rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the
+islanded Greeks said of near Venus.  Traces of this origin he still
+bears both in his body and his emotions; and together they make up his
+first set of memories--Sea Memories.
+
+He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single
+picturesque phrase:
+
+"Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which the
+hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are
+sounding."
+
+Next he told her how man's last marine ancestor quit one day the sea
+never again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach and
+entered the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, soft to
+impressions, the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shape
+it over from sea uses to forest uses.
+
+A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at the
+sea-shell.
+
+It remodelled the shell as so much clay; stood it up and twisted and
+branched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron;
+tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble;
+painted it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it up
+as a life tower--the world's one beacon: steadily sending it onward
+through one trial form after another until at last had been perfected
+for it that angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to
+sob and to smile.
+
+And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and entered
+the forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared
+at the edge of the forest the creature it had made.  On every wall of
+its being internal and external forest-written; and completely
+forest-minded: having nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling,
+forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith; so that in all it could
+do or know or feel or dream or imagine or believe it was
+forest-tethered.
+
+At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelled
+to emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had been
+driven to quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn of
+our history of him.
+
+And if the first set of race memories--Sea Memories--still endure
+within him, how much more powerful are the second set--the Forest
+Memories!
+
+So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished as
+forest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant races
+on the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether and
+will become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerful
+that those highest races which have been longest out in the open--as
+our own Aryan race--have never ceased to be reached by the influence
+of the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning trees
+falling across the mortal clearings toward the sunset.
+
+These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlike
+generations of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuated
+affections which we call in ourselves the Love of Nature; these
+affections are inherited: new feelings for nature we have none. The
+writers of our day who speak of civilized man's love of nature as a
+developing sense err wholly. They are like explorers who should
+mistake a boundary for the interior of a continent. Man's knowledge of
+nature is modern, but it no more endows him with new feeling than
+modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new bone or his latest
+knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an additional artery.
+
+Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are Forest
+Memories.
+
+But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, that
+contains the separate buried root of the story: Man's Forest Faith.
+
+When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it had
+planted in him--there to grow forever--the root of faith that he was a
+forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the
+science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To
+himself forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be
+his immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the
+Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were
+descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race
+is tethered to the world-ash.  Among every people of antiquity this
+forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some
+ancestral tree. In the Orient each succeeding Buddha of Indian
+mythology was tethered to a different tree; each god of the later
+classical Pantheon was similarly tethered: Jupiter to the oak, Apollo
+to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno to the
+apple, on and on. Forest worship was universal--the most impressive
+and bewildering to modern science that the human spirit has ever built
+up. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the Trees.
+
+Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the ages
+toward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew with
+his growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successive
+scythes of time; but always new sprouts were put forth.
+
+Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodily
+presence within the forest; but one final day the forest lost the
+Immortal as its indwelling creator.
+
+Next the old forest worshipper peopled the trees with an intermediate
+race of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long he
+beguiled himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; but
+the lesser could not maintain themselves in temples from which the
+greater had already been expelled, and they too passed out of sight
+down the roadway of the world.
+
+Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and during
+yet later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woods
+became freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals of
+his own race had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations of
+the gods.  Then this last panorama of illusion faded also, and
+civilized man stood face to face with the modern woods--inhabitated
+only by its sap and cells. The trees had drawn their bark close around
+them, wearing an inviolate tapestry across those portals through which
+so many a stranger to them had passed in and passed out; and
+henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest--its one reply to all
+man's questionings--became the Voice of its own Mystery.
+
+After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. But
+we must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of
+human life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own
+Indo-European race dwells as it were on the forest edge. And the
+forest still reaches out and twines itself around our deepest
+spiritual truths: home--birth--love--prayer--death: it tries to
+overrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our houses,
+instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and to
+shelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countries
+whenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature;
+in our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonies
+with garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped
+hi cathedral stone--memory of the grove, God's first temple; and when
+we die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of
+our rest.  Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some
+obscure instinct in us that it is God-forsaken.
+
+Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for his
+spirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf and
+tendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every later
+world-worship; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into the
+ritual of Christianity.
+
+This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence at
+the Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man worshipping the
+tree as the Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we see
+him using that tree in the worship of the creative Father's Son come
+to earth in the Father's stead.
+
+"On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brief
+tapers of the night; but on it rests also the long light of that
+spiritual dawn when man began his Adoration of the Trees.  It is the
+forest taking its place once more beside the long-lost Immortal."
+
+Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should address
+her thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual for
+them. For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the ground
+of his lectures, and she shared his thought before it reached
+others. It was their high and equal comradeship. Wherever his mind
+could go hers went--a brilliant torch, a warming sympathy.
+
+But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on a
+motionless figure of stone.  If he was sensible of this change in her,
+he gave no sign. And after a moment he passed to the remaining part of
+the story.
+
+"Thus far I have been speaking to you of the bare tree in wild nature:
+here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you that
+they too are Forest Memories--that since the evergreen moved over into
+the service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds these
+Forest Memories have followed it and have alighted amid its
+branches. Everything here has its story. I am going to tell you in
+each case what that story is; I am going to interpret everything on
+the Christmas Tree and the other Christmas decorations in the room."
+
+It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him and
+never afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoe
+would have its; he must interpret that: and thus he himself
+unexpectedly had brought about the situation she wished. She would
+meet him at that symbolic bough: there be rendered the Judgment of the
+Years! And now as one sits down at some point of a road where a
+traveller must arrive, she waited for him there.
+
+He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest
+worshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his
+offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in
+offering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man had
+learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive
+custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during
+that immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set
+one stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove--the
+only cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was
+prayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the
+Christmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of
+primitive man and is as ancient as forest worship itself.
+
+And now he began.
+
+With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of the
+fir. This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of
+Bethlehem which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the
+Night of the Nativity--the Star of the New Born. But modern
+discoveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or
+five thousand years before the Christian era; and as far back as they
+have been traced, we find the wise men of the East worshipping this
+same star and being guided by it in their spiritual wanderings as they
+searched for the incarnation of the Divine. They worshipped it as the
+star of peace and goodness and purity. Many a pious Wolfram in those
+dim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn to the same star, for
+love of some Chaldean Elizabeth--both he and she blown about the
+desert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on these records the
+star and the Tree are brought together as here side by side.  And the
+story of the star leads backward to one of the first things that man
+ever worshipped as he looked beyond the forest: the light of the
+heavens floating in the depth of space--light that he wanted but could
+not grasp.
+
+He touched the next object on the Tree--the candle under the star--and
+went on:
+
+Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at the end of ages having
+caught this light--having brought it down in the language of his myth
+from heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in space as having
+become a star in his hand--the candle: the star worshipper had now
+become also the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back to the
+fire worshippers of ancient Persia--those highlands of the spirit
+seeking light. We think of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merely
+borrowed from the candle of the altar for the purpose of illumination;
+but the use of it goes back to a time when the forest worshipper, now
+also the fire worshipper, hung his lights on the trees, having no
+other altar. Far down toward modern times the temples of the old
+Prussians, for example, were oak groves, and among them a hierarchy of
+priests was ordained to keep the sacred fire perpetually burning at
+the root of the sacred oak.
+
+He touched the third object on the tree--the cross under the
+candle--and went on:
+
+"To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event:
+Calvary and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw
+and the apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that age
+thought of the cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Paul
+and the rest went down into their graves without so regarding it. The
+Magdalene never clung to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out at
+the foot of it the benizon of her tears. Not until the third century
+after Christ did the Bishops assembled at Nice announce it a Christian
+symbol. But it was a sacred emblem in the dateless antiquity of
+Egypt. To primitive man it stood for that sacred light and fire of
+life which was himself. For he himself is a cross--the first cross he
+has ever known. The faithful may truly think of the Son of Man as
+crucified as the image of humanity.  And thus ages before Christ,
+cross worship and forest worship were brought together: for instance,
+among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs of which made with
+the trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on these three they
+cut the names of three of their gods and this was holy-cross wood."
+
+He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on the
+tree--the dove under the cross, and went on:
+
+"In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white dove
+of the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the
+heavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends,
+overshadowing the Grail. But ages before Christ the prolific white
+dove of Syria was worshipped throughout the Orient as the symbol of
+reproductive Nature: and to this day the Almighty is there believed to
+manifest himself under this form. In ancient Mesopotamia the divine
+mother of nature is often represented with this dove as having
+actually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand. And here again
+forest worship early became associated with the worship of the dove;
+for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove nurtured in
+the oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and its wings
+an omen."
+
+On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story of
+each backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each was
+entwined with forest worship.
+
+He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, he
+said, was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of
+the vine. And vine worship was forest worship.  Moreover, in the same
+oak grove at Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and their
+tinklings also were sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boy
+beats on Christmas Day, was beaten ages before Christ in the worship
+of Confucius: the story of it dies away toward what was man's first
+written music in forgotten China.  In the first century of the
+Christian era, on one of the most splendid of the old Buddhist
+sculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the worship of
+the sacred tree--once more showing how music passed into the service
+of forest faith.
+
+He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram's
+horn--the primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and used
+also to pour out the last product of the vine in honor of the vine
+itself--the forest's first goblet.
+
+He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldest
+of all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learned
+to shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could at
+least bring to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring,
+the wild fruit of autumn.
+
+He kept on until only three things on the Tree were left
+uninterpreted; the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that
+he had left these to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the
+most trivial but really the most grave; for by means of them most
+clearly could be traced the presence of great law running through the
+progress of humanity.
+
+He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping it
+like a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course of
+ages it had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forest
+worship: a once universal custom of adorning the tree with everything
+most precious to the giver in token of his sacrifice and
+self-sacrifice.  Even in Jeremiah is an account of the lading of the
+sacred tree with gold and ornaments.  Herodotus relates that when
+Xerxes was invading Lydia, on the march he saw a divine tree and had
+it honored with golden robes and gifts. Livy narrates that when
+Romulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal City, he hung rich
+spoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this custom of
+decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until we can
+meet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece
+and in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.  Now the custom
+has dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree--the mock
+sacrifice for the real.
+
+He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind their
+mockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing
+prisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forest
+worship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this to
+have been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes.  In the course
+of time, when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mock
+countenance replaced the real.
+
+He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others,
+its long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificing
+children in forest worship. How common this custom was the early
+literature of the human race too abundantly testifies. We encounter
+the trace of it in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac--arrested by the
+command of Jehovah. But Abraham would never have thought of slaying
+his son to propitiate his God, had not the custom been well
+established.  In the case of Jephthah's daughter the sacrifice was
+actually allowed. We come upon the same custom in the fate of
+Iphigenia--at a critical turning point in the world's mercy; in her
+stead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac's case, was
+accepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against the
+inhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock for
+the real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of the
+Christmas Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive rites
+only these playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of the
+innocent.
+
+He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All the
+little stories, like pathways running backward into the distance and
+ever converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forest
+worship and they met in some sacrifice by the human heart.
+
+And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:
+
+"Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Tree
+is all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper could
+not worship without giving, because to worship is to give: therefore
+he brought his gifts to the forest--his first altar. These gifts,
+remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were his
+sacrifices and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since,
+the same law lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed the
+better to the worse; in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to
+the best. If the race should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, it
+would still have to worship what is highest in human nature and so
+worshipping, it would still be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice
+become the law of self-sacrifice: it would still be necessary to offer
+up what is low in us to what is higher. Only one portion of mankind
+has ever believed in Jerusalem; but every religion has known its own
+Calvary."
+
+He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited her
+appreciation. She had sat watching him without a movement and without
+a word.  But when at last she asked him a question, she spoke as a
+listener who wakens from a long revery.
+
+"Have you finished the story for me?" she inquired.
+
+"I have finished the story for you," he replied without betraying
+disappointment at her icy reception of it.
+
+Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head,
+turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throat
+showed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays of
+mistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:
+
+"You have not interpreted this," she said, her mind fixed on that sole
+omission.
+
+"I have not explained that," he admitted.
+
+She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest toward
+the manuscript on the table across the room.
+
+"Have you explained it there?"
+
+"I have not explained it there."
+
+"But why?" she said with disappointment.
+
+"I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine."
+
+"But why, Frederick?" she inquired, startled into wonderment.
+
+He smiled: "If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story."
+
+"But why do you not wish to tell me the story?"
+
+He answered with warning frankness: "If you once saw it as a picture,
+the picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life
+darkly."
+
+She protested: "If it is dark to you, why should I not share the
+darkness of it? Have we not always looked at life's shadows together?
+And thus seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us
+and dark things but half as dark?"
+
+He merely repeated his warning: "It is a story of a crueler age than
+ours. It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids."
+
+She answered: "So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to
+take seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from
+the forest worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not
+printed in books? Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in
+libraries to be read? If others read them, may not I? And since when
+must I begin to dread anything in books?  Or anything in life? And
+since when did we begin to look at life apart, we who have always
+looked at it with four eyes?"
+
+"I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things
+to see with two, and things to see with none."
+
+With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
+mistletoe.
+
+"Tell me the story of this!" she pleaded as though she demanded a
+right. As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they
+closed and went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the
+white pearls of the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and
+were broken apart and rolled across her breast into her lap.
+
+He looked grave; silence or speech--which were better for her? Either,
+he now saw, would give her pain.
+
+"Happily the story is far away from us," he said, as though he were
+half inclined to grant her request.
+
+"If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you
+brought the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the
+dove and the others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me!
+Steep me in it as you have steeped yourself!"
+
+He held back a long time: "You who are so safe in good, why know
+evil?"
+
+"Frederick," she cried, "I shall have to insist upon your telling me
+this story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know.
+Then tell it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give
+each heavy part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty--and truth be
+truth!"
+
+He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
+change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into
+the narrative of the historian:
+
+"Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
+Palestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening
+by the blue AEgean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals--the
+living images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful
+eternity of Art--Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in
+the temple at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little
+children who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown
+soldiers of Caesar's legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the
+sacred grove of Dodona,--where the motions of oak boughs were
+auguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divine
+messages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine
+meanings,--in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of
+Ephesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites. To the
+south Pompeii, with its night laughter and song sounding far out
+toward the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes of its dread
+volcano, drained its goblet and did not care, emptied it as often as
+filled and asked for nothing more. A little distance off Herculaneum,
+with its tender dreams of Greece but with its arms around the
+breathing image of Italy, slept--uncovered.
+
+"Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps,
+lay unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Caesar who was to conquer
+it; and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of
+Britain. All over that island one forest; in that forest one worship;
+in that worship one tree--the oak of England; and on that oak one
+bough--the mistletoe."
+
+He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had in
+the early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it was
+the tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah.  In Greece it was the
+tree of Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italy
+it was the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of
+mankind. After the gods passed, it became the tree of the imperial
+Caesars. After the Caesars had passed, it was the oak that Michael
+Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the ceiling of the Sistine
+Chapel near the creation of man and his expulsion from Paradise--there
+as always the chosen tree of human desire.  In Britain it was the
+sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests
+performed none of their rites without using its leaves and branches:
+never anywhere in the world was the oak worshipped with such
+ceremonies and sacrifices as there.
+
+Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forest
+worship: the New Year's day of the Druids.
+
+A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their
+way to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been
+found with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As the
+excited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of
+reverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is
+spread. In the midst of the assemblage one figure towers--the Arch
+Druid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own
+eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victims
+annually sacrificed to the oak.
+
+A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is
+clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough,
+and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden
+pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is
+blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each
+one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of
+which it is Nature's emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have
+never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are
+slaughtered in sacrifice.
+
+Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to
+itself, and the New Year's ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the
+oak is at an end.
+
+Here he ended the story.
+
+She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows
+knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in
+bewilderment:
+
+"But why did you call that a dark story?"  she asked. "Where is the
+cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will
+never throw a dark image on my mind: New Year's day--the winter
+woods--the journeying throng--the oak--the bough--the banquet
+beneath--the white bulls with fillets on their horns--the white-robed
+priest--the golden sickle in his hand--the stroke that severs the
+mistletoe--the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will
+be blessed in life's sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like
+to paint that scene.  In the centre should be some young girl,
+pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven's covenant with
+her under the guise of a blossom.  How could you have wished to
+withhold such a story from me?"
+
+He smiled at her a little sadly.
+
+"I have not yet told you all," he said, "but I have told you enough."
+
+Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under
+her breath one word escaped:
+
+"Ah!"
+
+It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown to
+her.
+
+"I am sparing you, Josephine!"
+
+She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the
+wood in her clutch.
+
+"Are you sparing me?" she asked in a tone of torture. "Or are you
+sparing yourself?"
+
+The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed
+grasp to the floor.  He looked down at it a moment and then calmly
+picked it up.
+
+"I am going to tell you the story," he said with a new quietness.
+
+She was aroused by some change in him.
+
+"I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!"
+
+"You will have to listen," he said. "It is better for you to
+know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the
+bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be
+impossible for you to misjudge."
+
+"I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I
+do not understand you are judging yourself!"
+
+He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himself
+up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right
+not to be pried into--not even by the nearest.
+
+The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer
+to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being
+thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his
+shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand
+of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial
+tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on
+him--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let its
+passing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned
+his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor
+likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood
+ankle-deep in forestry.
+
+This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of
+it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old
+forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest
+tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the
+earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she
+waited.
+
+He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the
+first sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:
+
+"Listen, Josephine!"
+
+She buried her face in her hands.
+
+"I cannot! I will not!"
+
+"You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my
+other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our
+people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first
+meaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forest
+survivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play and
+pastimes and lingering superstitions about the forest we cross faint
+traces of what were once vital realities.
+
+"Among these there has always been one that until recently I have
+never understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of
+everywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under the
+mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have
+always thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to
+some ancient rite--I could not discover what. Now I know."
+
+In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.
+
+It is another scene in the forest of Britain.  This time it is not the
+first day of the year--the New Year's day of the Druids when they
+celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer,
+perhaps the middle of May--May in England--with the young beauty of
+the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight.  The new moon is
+just silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the
+trees.  The hawthorn is in bloom--red and white--and not far from the
+spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing,
+singing, singing.
+
+Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of
+the woods--a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its
+youth and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the
+all-day sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild
+violet beds. Its huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though
+reaching for some object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as
+its badge of divine authority, worn there as a knight might wear the
+colors of his Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands--the
+Forest Lover.
+
+The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the
+moon's rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more
+passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.
+
+Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the
+scene a young girl enters--her hair hanging down--her limbs most
+lightly clad--the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her
+skin--in her eyes love's great need and mystery. Step by step she
+comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside
+thing may stay her strength.  She draws nearer to the oak, searching
+amid its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet
+more dreads not to find: the emblem of a woman's fruitfulness which
+the young oak--the Forest Lover--reaches down toward her.  Finding it,
+beneath it with one deep breath of surrender she takes her place--the
+virgin's tryst with the tree--there to be tested.
+
+Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience--submission to
+that test--or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has
+rejected.
+
+Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man
+enters--a tried and seasoned man--a human oak--counterpart of the
+Forest Lover--to officiate at the test.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence
+of his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of
+ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.
+
+_He_ was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was _his_
+feet that started toward the oak; _his_ eye that searched for the
+figure half fainting under the bough; for _him_ the bed of moss
+and violets--the hair falling over the eyes--the loosened girdle--the
+breasts of hawthorn white and pink--the listening song of the
+nightingale--the silence of the summer woods--the seclusion--the full
+surrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape
+the penalty of their own death.
+
+The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his
+own story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The
+light that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them--the
+old, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense
+nostrils.
+
+And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years
+before and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his
+lips--tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the
+room fell his words:
+
+"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"
+
+The storm that had broken over him died away.  He shut his eyes on the
+vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.
+
+He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or
+he may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about
+himself.
+
+"This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine," he said quietly.
+
+She was sitting there before him--the mother of his children, of the
+sleeping ones, of the buried ones--the butterfly broken on the wheel
+of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.
+
+She sat there with the whiteness of death.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+
+
+The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white
+candles of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the
+room concealed its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar
+from the faithful tree beside the house wall had need now of its
+bitter rosary.
+
+Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit--the
+debt of courtesy and gratitude.
+
+"It is a wonderful story, Frederick," she said in a manner which
+showed him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to
+the end.
+
+"As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path
+into the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back
+what no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that
+I never dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your
+having done this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too
+much for me to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try
+to understand it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by
+waiting. But now there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to
+speak to you about that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some
+questions about the last part of the story. I have been wanting to ask
+you a long time: the story gives me the chance and--the right."
+
+He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen.
+
+"I will answer them," he said. "If they can be answered."
+
+And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers passed
+to and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn out
+of the deeps of life and sinking back into them.
+
+"Frederick," she said, "for many years we have been happy together, so
+happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us except
+the loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our
+years, lifted above life's storms. But of course I have realized that
+sooner or later our lot must become the common one: if we did not go
+down to Sorrow, Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the
+heights it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you to-night what
+I shall: I think fate's hour has struck for me; I am ready to hear
+it. Its arrow has already left the bow and is on its way; I open my
+heart to receive it. This is as I have always wished; I have said that
+if life had any greatest tragedy, for me, I hoped it would come when I
+was happiest; thus I should confront it all. I have never drunk half
+of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let the other half waste; I
+must go equally to the depth of any suffering.  Worse than the
+suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked some of
+it, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown myself
+a cowardly soul."
+
+After a pause she went over this subject as though she were not
+satisfied that she had made it clear.
+
+"I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief that
+comes to us in life when life is at its best--when no one is to
+blame--when no one has committed a fault--when suffering is meted out
+to us as the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. In
+earlier years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all of
+the world's poets felt the things that pass, even then I was wondering
+at the way in which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow it
+must be separated from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkening
+the bright disk of life's clear tragedy, thus rendering it less
+bravely seen.
+
+"And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor play
+with mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks
+of Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf's bane and twist the
+poison out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock;
+nor bind about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count
+over the berries of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of
+the beetle ticking in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death
+moth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl--the voice of ruins. Not
+these! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow
+are beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red peony just
+opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on the white foam, youth not
+yet faded but already fading, joy with its finger on his lips, bidding
+adieu.
+
+"And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life's
+tragedy. And to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: _I want to be
+told_."
+
+"If you can be told, you shall be told," he said.
+
+She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and
+composure. Then she began:
+
+"Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college
+friend. You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and
+celebrated the German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to
+have the Christmas Tree in our house--through memory of him and of
+those years. You have often described to me how you and he in summer
+went Alpine climbing, and far up in some green valley girdled with
+glaciers lay of afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drowsing
+in the crystalline air. You told me of your nights of wandering down
+the Rhine together when the heart turns so intimately to the heart
+beside it. He was German youth and song and dream and happiness to
+you. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer over the
+crevasse, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you that
+began to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at the
+friendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret for
+him?"
+
+He answered out of the ideals of his youth:
+
+"The longer I knew him, the more I loved him.  I never tired of being
+with him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When he
+was lost, the whole world lost some of its strength and
+nobility. After all the years, if he could come back, he would find me
+unchanged--that friend of my youth!"
+
+With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:
+
+"The doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor, your
+closest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor;
+he is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talking
+with one another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor and
+wish him away?  Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keep
+secret from me? Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend of
+your middle life?"
+
+"The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. I
+never tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have no
+disguises with him and need none."
+
+"The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them?
+Do they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference?  Have
+Harold and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you?
+Do you ever unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?"
+
+"The older they grow, the more I love them.  The more they interest me
+and tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with them
+and I live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming."
+
+"Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does it
+develop in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you the
+regret to be something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad to
+toil?"
+
+"As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down the
+stag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs for
+fortune, as the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the
+cross, I follow my work, I follow my work."
+
+"Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the world
+still morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you begin
+to tire and to think of rest?"
+
+"The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to his
+work. Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and why
+it exists at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what
+it hates; why it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless
+when it should be true; how civilized man can fight single handed
+against the ages that were his lower past--how he can develop
+self-renunciation out of selfishness and his own wisdom out of
+surrounding folly,--all these are questions that mean more and
+more. My work is but beginning and the world is morning."
+
+"This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would you
+rather move into a new one?"
+
+"I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take its
+place. Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care more
+for it now that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were a
+ruin, I should love it best!"
+
+She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet.
+
+"Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?"
+
+"I think more of them and take better care of them now that their
+hunting days are over."
+
+"The friend of your youth--the friend of your middle age--the
+children--your profession--the world of human life--this house--the
+dogs of the house--you care more for them all as time passes?"
+
+"I care more for them all as time passes."
+
+Then there came a great stillness in the room--the stillness of all
+listening years.
+
+"Am I the only thing that you care less for as time passes?"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+"Am I in the way?"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+"Would you like to go over it all again with another?"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against the
+end of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape
+being touched by him--to escape the blow of his words. No words
+came. There was no touch.
+
+A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, looking
+down at her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck.
+He must be kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with a
+kind of incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At first
+she could so little believe it, that with her face still buried in one
+hand she searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touch
+him.
+
+Then she cried out to him:
+
+"Isn't there anything you can say to me?"
+
+Silence lasted.
+
+"_Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred_!"
+
+In the stillness she began to hear something--the sound of his
+footsteps moving on the carpet.  She sat up.
+
+The room was getting darker; he was putting out the candles. It was
+too dark already to see his face. With fascination she began to watch
+his hand. How steady it was as it moved among the boughs,
+extinguishing the lights. Out they went one by one and back into their
+darkness returned the emblems of darker ages--the Forest Memories.
+
+A solitary taper was left burning at the pinnacle of the Tree under
+the cross: that highest torch of love shining on everything that had
+disappeared.
+
+He quietly put it out.
+
+Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly to have travelled
+through the open parlor door into the adjoining room, her bedroom; for
+out of that there now streamed a suffused red light; it came from the
+lamp near the great bed in the shadowy corner.
+
+This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance of
+a bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with the
+weight of its own splendor falls face downward on the grass. And in
+that room this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winter
+draperies.  He had been living alone as a bachelor before he married
+her. After they became engaged he, having watched for some favorite
+color of hers, had had this room redecorated in that shade. Every
+winter since she had renewed in this way or that way these hangings,
+and now the bridal draperies remained unchanged--after the changing
+years.
+
+He replaced the taper against the wall and came over and stood before
+her, holding out his hands to help her rise.
+
+She arose without his aid and passed around him, moving toward her
+bedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, he
+followed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom and
+crossed to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping
+her face bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closed
+the door on him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with which
+the soul tears out of itself something that has been its life, she
+made a circlet of her white arms against the door and laid her profile
+within this circlet and stood--the figure of Memory.
+
+Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tomb
+where some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a far
+land,--walking some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all human
+stories end; an autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of its
+mortality and his heart singing with the bird of one lost to him--lost
+to him in his own country.
+
+On the other side of the door the silence was that of a tomb. She had
+felt confident--so far as she had expected anything--that he would
+speak to her through the door, try to open it, plead with her to open
+it. Nothing of the kind occurred.
+
+Why did he not come back? What bolt could have separated her from him?
+
+The silence began to weigh upon her.
+
+Then in the tense stillness she heard him moving quietly about,
+getting ready for bed.  There were the same movements, familiar to her
+for years. She would not open the door, she could not leave it, she
+could not stand, no support was near, and she sank to the floor and
+sat there, leaning her brow against the lintel.
+
+On the other side the quiet preparations went on.
+
+She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back of
+a chair. The buttons made a little scraping sound against the wood.
+Then he went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and he
+opened a drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking of
+a chair under him as he threw one foot and then the other up across
+his knee and took off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her the
+soft movements of his bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony the
+old impulse started in her to caution him about his slippers). Then
+followed the brushing of his teeth and the deliberate bathing of his
+hands. Then was audible the puff of breath with which he blew out his
+lamp after he had turned it low; and then,--on the other side of the
+door,--just above her ear his knock sounded.
+
+The same knock waited for and responded to throughout the years; so
+often with his little variations of playfulness. Many a time in early
+summer when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing some
+bird sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood--that tap of
+heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear.
+
+Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though her
+flesh were but will and spirit. When he knocked again, she was across
+the room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her palms pressed
+together and thrust between her knees: the instinctive act of a human
+animal suddenly chilled to the bone.
+
+The knocking sounded again.
+
+"Was there anything you needed?" she asked fearfully.
+
+There was no response but another knock.
+
+She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure that it would reach him.
+
+"Was there anything you wanted?"
+
+As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greater
+alarm, and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated her
+one question:
+
+"Did you forget anything?"
+
+Her mind refused to release itself from the iteration of that idea: it
+was some _thing_--not herself--that he wanted.
+
+He knocked.
+
+Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, now made of his knock
+some signal of distress.  It took on the authority of an appeal not to
+be denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a little way, and once
+more she asked her one poor question.
+
+His answer to it came in the form of a gentle pressure against the
+door, breaking down her resistance. As she applied more strength, this
+was as gently overcome; and when the opening was sufficient, he walked
+past her into the room.
+
+How hushed the house! How still the world outside as the cloud wove in
+darkness its mantle of light!
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+
+
+Day was breaking.
+
+The crimson curtains of the bedroom were drawn close, but from behind
+their outer edges faint flanges of light began to advance along the
+wall. It was a clear light reflected from snow which had sifted in
+against the window-panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged the
+yard fence, peaked the little gate-posts, and buried the shrubbery.
+There was no need to look out in order to know that it had stopped
+snowing, that the air was windless, and that the stars were flashing
+silver-pale except one--great golden-croziered shepherd of the thick,
+soft-footed, moving host.
+
+It was Christmas morning on the effulgent Shield.
+
+Already there was sufficient light in the room to reveal--less as
+actual things than as brown shadows of the memory--a gay company of
+socks and stockings hanging from the mantelpiece; sufficient to give
+outline to the bulk of a man asleep on the edge of the bed; and it
+exposed to view in a corner of the room farthest from the rays a woman
+sitting in a straight-backed chair, a shawl thrown about her shoulders
+over her night-dress.
+
+He always slept till he was awakened; the children, having stayed up
+past their usual bedtime, would sleep late also; she had the white
+dawn to herself in quietness.
+
+She needed it.
+
+Sleep could not have come to her had she wished. She had not slept and
+she had not lain down, and the sole endeavor during those shattered
+hours had been to prepare herself for his awakening. She was not yet
+ready--she felt that during the rest of her life she should never be
+quite ready to meet him again. Scant time remained now.
+
+Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment and outdoor noises would
+begin. Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of its
+size, rose by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town was
+proud of its smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields;
+whereever any hamlet marked the point at which two country roads this
+morning made the sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudly
+castled on woody hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder from
+amid their olive-dark winter pastures; or far away on the shaggy
+uplift of the Shield wherever any cabin clung like a swallow's nest
+against the gray Appalachian wall--everywhere soon would begin the
+healthy outbreak of joy among men and women and children--glad about
+themselves, glad in one another, glad of human life in a happy
+world. The many-voiced roar and din of this warm carnival lay not far
+away from her across the cold bar of silence.
+
+Soon within the house likewise the rush of the children's feet would
+startle her ear; they would be tugging at the door, tugging at her
+heart.  And as she thought of this, the recollection of old simple
+things came pealing back to her from behind life's hills. The years
+parted like naked frozen reeds, and she, sorely stricken in her
+womanhood, fled backward till she herself was a child again--safe in
+her father's and mother's protection. It was Christmas morning, and
+she in bare feet was tipping over the cold floors toward their
+bedroom--toward her stockings.
+
+Her father and mother! How she needed them at this moment: they had
+been sweethearts all their lives. One picture of them rose with
+distinctness before her--for the wounding picture always comes to the
+wounded moment. She saw them sitting in their pew far down toward the
+chancel. Through a stained glass window (where there was a ladder of
+angels) the light fell softly on them--both silver-haired; and as with
+the voices of children they were singing out of one book. She
+remembered how as she sat between them she had observed her father
+slip his hand into her mother's lap and clasp hers with a
+steadfastness that wedded her for eternity; and thus over their linked
+hands, with the love of their youth within them and the snows of the
+years upon them, they sang together:
+
+  "Gently, Lord, O gently lead us
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+  "Through the changes Thou'st decreed us."
+
+Her father and mother had not been led gently.  They had known more
+than common share of life's shocks and violence, its wrongs and
+meannesses and ills and griefs. But their faith had never wavered that
+they were being led gently; so long as they were led together, to them
+it was gentle leading: the richer each in each for aught whereby
+nature or man could leave them poorer; the calmer for the shocks; the
+sweeter for the sour; the finer with one another because of life's
+rudenesses.  In after years she often thought of them as faithful in
+their dust; and the flowers she planted over them and watered many a
+bright day with happy tears brought up to her in another form the
+freshness of their unwearied union.
+
+That was what she had not doubted her own life would be--with
+him--when she had married him.
+
+From the moment of the night before when he had forced the door open
+and entered her room, they had not exchanged any words nor a glance.
+He had lain down and soon fallen asleep; apparently he had offered
+that to her as for the moment at least his solution of the
+matter--that he should leave her to herself and absent himself in
+slumber.
+
+The instant she knew him to be asleep she set about her preparations.
+
+Before he awoke she must be gone--out of the house--anywhere--to save
+herself from living any longer with him. His indifference in the
+presence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touch
+and glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life's
+valleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing the
+whole truth, know it she should: all this left her wounded and stunned
+as by an incredible blow, and she was acting first from the instinct
+of removing herself beyond the reach of further humiliation and
+brutality.
+
+Instinctively she took off her wedding ring and laid it on his dresser
+beside his watch: he would find it there in the morning and he could
+dispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the plainest heavy one
+and put on heavy walking shoes. She packed into a handbag a few
+necessary things with some heirlooms of her own. Among the latter was
+a case of family jewels; and as she opened it, her eyes fell upon her
+mother's thin wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped that
+on and kissed it bitterly. She lifted out also her mother's locket
+containing a miniature daguerreotype of her father and dutifully fed
+her eyes on that. Her father was not silver-haired then, but
+raven-locked; with eyes that men feared at times but no woman ever.
+
+His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbed
+her exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she,
+coarsely wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, opened
+her front door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, and
+passed out--wading away. Those eyes of his saw what took place the
+next day: the happiness of Christmas morning turned into horror; the
+children wild with distress and crying--the servants dumb--the inquiry
+at neighbors' houses--the news spreading to the town--the papers--the
+black ruin. And from him two restraining words issued for her ear:
+
+"My daughter!"
+
+Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answered
+him. And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her blood
+took fire and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. She
+stopped her preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel.
+
+She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its
+place with exaggerated pains.  Having done this, she stood in the
+middle of the floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to
+that power of low suggestion which is one of anger's weapons, she
+began to devise malice.  She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took
+from a bottom drawer--where long ago it had been stored away under
+everything else--a shawl that had been her grandmother's; a brindled
+crewel shawl,--sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former
+generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she
+had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her
+ugliness and decrepitude.
+
+She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around
+her shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting
+it off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She
+turned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge
+lidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew
+a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put her
+forefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding places
+under the mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let these
+hang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefully
+nourished look of youth from her face--dropped the will to look
+young--and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it--into the
+wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, assisting each other so
+ably, had wrought in her.
+
+She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of
+the lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in
+exultation of vengeance that she was to live on there in his
+house--_his_ house.
+
+After a while a darker mood came over her.
+
+With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the
+room. She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it
+would be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber
+was heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat--with
+furtive look to see whether he observed her.
+
+A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.
+
+Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was
+Anglo-Saxon blood of the world's fiercest; floating in the tide of it
+passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in
+tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but
+fiercest ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A
+thousand years from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting
+beside some sleeping father of hers in their forest-beleaguered
+castle--the moonlight streaming in upon him through the javelined
+casement and putting before her the manly beauty of him--the blond
+hair matted thick on his forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth
+reddening in his slumber under its curling gold--some mother of hers
+whom he had carried off from other men by might of his sword, thus
+sitting beside him and knowing him to be colder to her now than the
+moon's dead rays, might have watched those rays as they travelled away
+from his figure and put a gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousand
+years ago: some mother of hers.
+
+It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers
+so often to take its place.  The best and the worst--these are the
+sole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making:
+hence life's spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever
+present about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the
+best as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to the
+standard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one may
+think of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the story
+that it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far:
+how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many a
+time they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabit
+such a privileged highland.
+
+During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the
+tragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a
+height of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to
+the lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or
+as the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as is
+unfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed the
+grateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light. All evil
+prompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be
+justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she was
+dragging herself out of life's quicksands upward to some rock, where
+there might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness.
+The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatred
+is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needs
+not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.
+
+He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its
+faithlessness and low carnal propensities.  What rankled most
+poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact
+that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain
+tops--that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling
+near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable
+to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now
+his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words
+about the growth of the world's spirit--about the sacrifice of the
+lower in ourselves to the higher--this cant now became to her the
+invocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carried
+the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of
+Immortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality.
+
+Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with
+spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when
+he had let her know that he wanted to be free--at that moment she
+might tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his
+unworthiness.
+
+And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the
+devil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.
+
+Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon
+companions. And at one period of the night she began to look back upon
+her experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity--to see it as
+a story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the
+first stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way into
+the care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the
+confidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and that
+receive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novels
+of the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent years
+studied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation's press, the
+nation's science of medicine, the nation's science of law, the
+nation's practice of religion, and the nation's imaginative literature
+were all at work with the same national omen--the decay of the
+American family and the downfall of the home.
+
+Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had
+incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where
+the older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation
+rock. The corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited
+her; and thus to-night she took her place among those women whom the
+world first hears of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of
+refuge and in their graves--and more sadly elsewhere; whose
+misfortunes interested the press and whose types attracted the
+novelists.
+
+She was one of them.
+
+They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who
+unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity--or walks
+into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under
+another name or with another lot lives on--devoting herself to memory
+or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to
+the world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains
+to her but living apart--on the other side of the locked door; the
+woman who stays on without locking the door, half-hating,
+half-loving--the accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who
+welcomes the end of the love-drama as the beginning of peace and the
+cessation of annoyances; the woman who begins to act her tragedy to
+servants and children and acquaintances--reaping sympathy for herself
+and sowing ruin and torture--for him; the woman who drops the care of
+house, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value
+as at least an investment toward his general well-being; the woman who
+endeavors to rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh
+fascinations; the woman who plays upon jealousy and touches the male
+instinct to keep one's own though little prized lest another acquire
+it and prize it more; the woman who sets a watch to discover the other
+woman: they swarmed about her, she identified each.
+
+And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their
+companionship; a strange dread moved her lest _they_ should
+discover _her_. One only she detached from the throng and for a
+while withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who
+when so rejected turns to another man--the man who is waiting
+somewhere near.
+
+The man _she_ turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the
+country doctor, her husband's tried and closest friend, whose children
+were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years
+_her_ secret had been--the doctor.  When she had come as a bride
+into that neighborhood, he, her husband's senior by several years, was
+already well established in his practice. He had attended her at the
+birth of her first child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had
+discovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This had
+dealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and he
+welcomed the wound.
+
+Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from
+the turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep
+alongside her, she could hear the doctor's buggy passing on its way to
+some patient, or on its return from the town where he had patients
+also. Many a time she had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of
+his life there turned in to her. There were nights of pitch darkness
+and beating rain; and sometimes on these she had to know that he was
+out there.
+
+Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where
+her husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the
+doctor. He would be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with
+him.
+
+Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and enveloped
+it. She groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old lost
+human paths.
+
+The endless night scarcely moved on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was wearied out, she was exhausted.  There is anger of such
+intensity that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations that
+are its fuel; nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame,
+and being unfed, it dies out.  Moreover, it is the destiny of a
+portion of mankind that they are enjoined by their very nobility from
+winning low battles; these always go against them: the only victories
+for them are won when they are leading the higher forces of human
+nature in life's upward conflicts.
+
+She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neither
+moral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundless
+plain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm;
+and slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like
+the radiance of the storm-winged sky.
+
+And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures
+appeared--her children.  Hitherto the energies of her mind had
+grappled with the problem of her future; now memories began--memories
+that decide more perhaps than anything else for us. And memories began
+with her children.
+
+She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it
+with the palm of her hand, started upstairs.
+
+There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear
+stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the
+broad stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit
+she started to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew
+back. This room had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the
+Years. She shrank from it as one who has been arraigned may shrink
+from a tribunal where sentence has been pronounced which changes the
+rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, but
+deepened the derision and the bitterness. And the evergreen there in
+the middle of the room--it became to her as that tree of the knowledge
+of good and evil which at Creation's morning had driven Woman from
+Paradise.
+
+She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house,
+but paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he
+should awake in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was?
+Would he call out to her--with what voice? Would he come to seek
+her--with what emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now--the
+drift back to the old mooring.)
+
+Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear of
+remembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to
+the last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seek
+her. It had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room to
+room for the delight of proving how persistently he would prolong his
+search. But one day some two years before this, when she had entered
+his study about the usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for his
+writing desk, she saw him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on,
+making some notes. The sight had struck the flowers from her hands;
+she swiftly gathered them up, and going to her room, shut herself in;
+she knew it was the beginning of the end.
+
+The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre of
+the bedchamber.
+
+When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he had
+done or failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself.
+Everything else had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; the
+old touch abandoning the hands; less time for her in the house, more
+for work; constraint beginning between them, the awkwardness of
+reserve; she seeing Nature's movement yet refusing to believe it; then
+at last resolving to know to the uttermost and choosing her bridal
+night as the hour of the ordeal.
+
+If he awoke, would he come to seek her--with what feelings?
+
+She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her right
+hand and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There was
+a turn in the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle rays
+fell on the face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on a
+step, putting the candle beside her; and there she remained, her
+elbows on her knees, her face resting on her palms; and into the abyss
+of the night dropped the tranquil strokes. More memories!
+
+She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding
+lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness
+overflowing its dumb environs--humanizing these--drawing them toward
+her by a gracious responsive symbolism--extending speech over realms
+which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have struck
+into speechlessness long aeons past.
+
+She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden God of Hours; she had
+often feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of it
+she would pin inside the walls little clusters of blossoms as votive
+offerings: if it would only move faster and bring him home!  The usual
+hour of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She had
+symbolized that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for the
+children--the three in one--the trinity of the household.
+
+She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her.
+
+The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him,
+up to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: all
+is well!
+
+It was the first sound that had reached her from any source during
+this agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outside
+humanity; from Time itself which brings us together and holds us
+together as long as possible and then separates us and goes on its
+way--indifferent whether we are together or apart; Time which welds
+the sands into the rock and then wears the rock away to its separate
+sands and sends the level tide softly over them.
+
+Once for him, once for her, once for the children!  She took up the
+candle and went upstairs to them.
+
+For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two little
+girls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and in
+another room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turned
+on one another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fist
+outside the cover. In a few years how differently the four would be
+divided and paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife;
+and out of the lives of the two of them who were hers she would then
+drop into some second place. If to-night she were realizing what
+befalls a wife when she becomes the Incident to her husband, she would
+then realize what befalls a woman when the mother becomes the Incident
+to her children: Woman, twice the Incident in Nature's impartial
+economy! Her son would playfully confide it to his bride that she must
+bear with his mother's whims and ways. Her daughter would caution her
+husband that he must overlook peculiarities and weaknesses. The very
+study of perfection which she herself had kindled and fanned in them
+as the illumination of their lives they would now turn upon her as a
+searchlight of her failings.
+
+He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of his
+discussing her with any human being. Even though he should some day
+desert her, he would never discuss her.
+
+She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with her
+against the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strength
+from her to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow.  But now she
+began to ask herself whether his protection _had_ failed her.
+Could he have recognized the situation without rendering it
+worse?  Had he put his arms around her, might she not have--struck at
+him? Had he laid a finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not have
+left a scar for life? Any words of his, would they not have rung in
+her ears unceasingly? To pass it over was as though it had never
+been--was not _that_ his protection?
+
+She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed her
+child in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor's
+children--with memory of their mother; and then she descended by the
+rear stairway.
+
+She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she had
+placed the lamp--near the manuscript--and she sat down and looked at
+that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there.
+
+He had made her the gift of his work--dedicated to her the triumphs of
+his toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his widening
+career and enter with him into the world's service.  She crossed her
+hands over it awhile, and then she left it.
+
+The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the
+immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.
+After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the
+echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music
+only,--the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She
+sat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear
+began faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of his story.
+
+One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watch
+the youth of the hemp--a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If
+the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulse
+swayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads
+were instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and east
+wind sent it west.
+
+And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we
+sometimes call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It is
+run through by many different laws; governed by many distinct forces,
+each of which strives to control it wholly--but never does.
+Selfishness blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all things
+seem to bow to the might of selfishness. Generosity moves across the
+expanse, and all things are seen responsive to what is generous. Place
+yourself where life is lowest and everything like an avalanche is
+rushing to the bottom. Place yourself where character is highest, and
+lo! the whole world is but one struggle upward to what is high. You
+see what you care to see, and find what you wish to find.
+
+In his story of the Forest and the Heart he had wanted to trace but
+one law, and he had traced it; he had drawn all things together and
+bent them before its majesty: the ancient law of Sacrifice. Of old the
+high sacrificed to the low; afterwards the low to the high: once the
+sacrifice of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but always in
+ourselves of the lower to the higher in order that, dying, we may
+live.
+
+With this law he had made his story a story of the world.
+
+The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldaea; the candle bore it to
+ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the
+dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it
+to Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and
+Rome; the doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe
+to Britain,--and all brought it to Christ,--Christ the latest
+world-ideal of sacrifice that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of
+all for all.
+
+The story was for herself, he had said, and for himself.
+
+Himself! Here at last all her pain and wandering of this night ended:
+at the bottom of her wound where rankled _his problem_.
+
+From this problem she had most shrunk and into this she now entered:
+She sacrificed herself in him! She laid upon herself his temptation
+and his struggle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Taking her candle, she passed back into her bedroom and screened it
+where she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom.
+
+She put her wedding ring on again with blanched lips. She went to his
+bedside, and drawing to the pillow the chair on which his clothes were
+piled, sat down and laid her face over on it; and there in that shrine
+of feeling where speech is formed, but whence it never issues, she
+made her last communion with him:
+
+_"You, to whom I gave my youth and all that youth could mean to me;
+whose children I have borne and nurtured at my breast--all of whose
+eyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of whom I have closed;
+husband of my girlhood, loved as no woman ever loved the man who took
+her home; strength and laughter of his house; helper of what is best
+in me; my defender against things in myself that I cannot govern;
+pathfinder of my future; rock of the ebbing years! Though my hair turn
+white as driven snow and flesh wither to the bone, I shall never cease
+to be the flame that you yourself have kindled.
+
+"But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where there
+must be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heard
+our whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences--the
+Long Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clung
+to!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!"_
+
+She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would
+not lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his
+pillow the last drop of things that must go.
+
+She there--her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life's
+Calvary of the Snows.
+
+The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, and
+there it brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near when
+she must awaken him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over before
+the children rushed downstairs or the servants knocked.
+
+She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the
+gray told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly
+away from brow and temples so that the contour of her head--one of
+nature's noblest--was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the
+women of her land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of
+their baptism into a new life.
+
+She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders rising
+out of this had the austerity of marble--exempt not from ruin, but
+exempt from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once and
+made a little instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide them
+under the sleeves.
+
+Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and
+quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it.
+Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes--the look
+of the rejected.
+
+So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed,
+resting on one elbow and looking down at him.
+
+For years her first words to him on this day had been the world's best
+greeting:
+
+"A Merry Christmas!"
+
+She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready.
+
+At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and
+instantly looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out
+of it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what their future
+would be worth. But at the sight of her so changed--something so gone
+out of her forever--with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She
+struggled to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly
+about the youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his
+face. She caught at one of the braids of her hair and threw it across
+her eyes, and then silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her.
+The torrent of her tears raining down into his tears.
+
+Tears not for Life's faults but for Life when there are no
+faults. They locked in each other's arms--trying to save each other on
+Nature's vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea.
+
+The rush of children's feet was heard in the hall and there was
+smothered laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob.
+
+It was Christmas Morning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward over
+the gladness of the Shield.  The farmhouse--such as the poet had sung
+of when he could not help singing of American home life--looked out
+from under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller
+who laughs at the snow on his hat and shoulders.  Smoke poured out of
+its chimneys, bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak
+tree beside it stood quieted of its moaning and tossing.  Soon after
+sunrise a soul of passion on scarlet wings, rising out of the
+snow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a topmost twig of the oak; and
+sitting there with its breast to the gorgeous sun scanned for a little
+while that landscape of ice. It was beyond its intelligence to
+understand how nature could create it for Summer and then take Summer
+away. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a sun so
+true could shine on a world so false.
+
+Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovelling
+paths. After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with
+fireside warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat,
+rushed out of the front door pursued by a little soldier sternly
+booted and capped and gloved; and the two snowballed each other, going
+at it furiously. Watching them through a window a little girl, dancing
+a dreamy measure of her own, ever turned inward and beckoned to some
+one to come and look--beckoned in vain.
+
+All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the little
+girl played with the doll--hugged to her breast the symbol of ancient
+sacrifice, the emblem of the world's new mercy. Along the turnpike
+sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and the
+shouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across the
+shining valleys.
+
+Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!
+
+One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from its
+surroundings; just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low,
+thick, covered with snow except where a bough had been broken off for
+decorating the house; here owing to the steepness the snow slid
+off. The spot looked like a wound in the side of the Divine purity,
+and across this open wound the tree had hung its rosary-beads never to
+be told by Sorrow's fingers.
+
+The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backward
+across the sadness of the Shield.  One by one the stars came back to
+their faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinging
+lamp was lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little round
+mats of snow stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost a
+low Christmas star was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; and
+between those beacons soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and
+children assembling for the party.
+
+Late into the night the party lasted.
+
+The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went to
+ashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and the
+robust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of our
+life. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate and
+drank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to go
+faster than the music.
+
+The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on the
+Christmas Tree--the handing over to this person and to that person of
+those unread lessons of the ages--little mummied packages of the lord
+of time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced those
+burnt out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were white
+now.
+
+Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene!
+Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house:
+hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughing
+and talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to the
+doctor's wife--faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be the
+American wife and mother in the home of the poet's dream: the
+spiritual majesty of her bridal veil still about her amid life's snow
+as it never lifts itself from the face of the _Jungfrau_ amid the
+sad most lovely mountains: the American wife and mother!--herself the
+_Jungfrau_ among the world's women!
+
+The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takes
+place there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the State
+which is also a song of the Nation--its melody of the unfallen home:
+with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated at
+the piano--the others upholding her like a living bulwark.
+
+There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of:
+those Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the
+embodied--the Guests of the Imagination.
+
+The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambers
+arm and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that present
+scene nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree the
+Wraiths of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naught
+of those later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to fill
+their places. Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes
+that bent undivided attention upon the actual pageant: these were
+Life's Pities. Ever and anon they would lift their noble veils and
+look out upon that brief flicker of our mortal joy, and drop them and
+relapse into their compassionate vigil.
+
+But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filled
+the entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through the
+rooms with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckoned
+her to a place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered back
+peeped shyly at her but then with some sure instinct of recognition
+ran to her and threw down their gifts, to put their arms around
+her. And the Pities before they left the house that night walked past
+her one by one and each lifted its veil and dropped it more softly.
+
+This was the Shape:
+
+In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet under the
+chandelier--which had no decoration whatsoever--stood an exquisite
+Spirit of Youth, more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet most
+alive; her lips scarce parted--her skin like white hawthorn shadowed
+by pink--in her eyes the modesty of withdrawal from Love--in her heart
+the surrender to it. During those distracting hours never did she move
+nor did her look once change: she waiting there--waiting for some one
+to come--waiting.
+
+Waiting.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
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diff --git a/9179.zip b/9179.zip
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #9179 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9179)
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
+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: Bride of the Mistletoe
+
+Author: James Lane Allen
+
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9179]
+This file was first posted on September 11, 2003
+Last Updated: October 30, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and Distributed Proofreaders
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+HTML file produced by David Widger
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+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By James Lane Allen
+    </h2>
+    <h5>
+      Author Of &ldquo;Flute And Violin,&rdquo; &ldquo;A Kentucky Cardinal,&rdquo; &ldquo;Aftermath,&rdquo; Etc.
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>TO ONE WHO KNOWS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raissoner. Mais il faut
+      regarder beaucoup et songer à ce qu&rsquo;on a vu. Voir: tout est là, et voir
+      juste. J&rsquo;entends, par voir juste, voir avec ses propres yeux et non avec
+      ceux des maîtres. L&rsquo;originalité d&rsquo;un artiste s&rsquo;indique d&rsquo;abord dans les
+      petites choses et non dans les grandes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n&rsquo;a pas encore découverte
+      et tâcher de l&rsquo;exprimer d&rsquo;une façon personelle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Any one about to read this work of fiction might properly be apprised
+      beforehand that it is not a novel: it has neither the structure nor the
+      purpose of The Novel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a story. There are two characters&mdash;a middle-aged married couple
+      living in a plain farmhouse; one point on the field of human nature is
+      located; at that point one subject is treated; in the treatment one
+      movement is directed toward one climax; no external event whatsoever is
+      introduced; and the time is about forty hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A second story of equal length, laid in the same house, is expected to
+      appear within a twelvemonth. The same father and mother are characters,
+      and the family friend the country doctor; but subordinately all. The main
+      story concerns itself with the four children of the two households.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an American children&rsquo;s story:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Brood of The Eagle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the year a third work, not fiction, will be published, entitled:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Christmas Tree: An Interpretation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The three works will serve to complete each other, and they complete a
+      cycle of the theme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> IV. THE WANDERING TALE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VI. THE WHITE DAWN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A mighty table-land lies southward in a hardy region of our country. It
+      has the form of a colossal Shield, lacking and broken in some of its
+      outlines and rough and rude of make. Nature forged it for some crisis in
+      her long warfare of time and change, made use of it, and so left it lying
+      as one of her ancient battle-pieces&mdash;Kentucky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Shield is raised high out of the earth at one end and sunk deep
+      into it at the other. It is tilted away from the dawn toward the sunset.
+      Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet, Nature, cunning
+      artificer, set the stream of ocean flowing past with restless foam&mdash;the
+      Father of Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound a bright river to
+      the rim of silver. And where the eastern part rises loftiest on the
+      horizon, turned away from the reddening daybreak, she piled shaggy
+      mountains wooded with trees that loose their leaves ere snowflakes fly and
+      with steadfast evergreens which hold to theirs through the gladdening and
+      the saddening year. Then crosswise over the middle of the Shield,
+      northward and southward upon the breadth of it, covering the life-born
+      rock of many thicknesses, she drew a tough skin of verdure&mdash;a broad
+      strip of hide of the ever growing grass. She embossed noble forests on
+      this greensward and under the forests drew clear waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This she did in a time of which we know nothing&mdash;uncharted ages
+      before man had emerged from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder,
+      thoughts to wander, heart to love, and spirit to pray. Many a scene the
+      same power has wrought out upon the surface of the Shield since she
+      brought him forth and set him there: many an old one, many a new. She has
+      made it sometimes a Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace. Nor has
+      she yet finished with its destinies as she has not yet finished with
+      anything in the universe. While therefore she continues her will and
+      pleasure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not forget the Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which admonish man how little
+      his lot has changed since Hephaistos wrought like scenes upon the shield
+      of Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like a falcon from snowy
+      Olympus bearing the glittering piece of armor to her angered son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are some of the scenes that were wrought on the shield of Achilles
+      and that to-day are spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze of lights as they lead the
+      bride from her chamber, flutes and violins sounding merrily. An
+      assembly-place where the people are gathered, a strife having arisen about
+      the blood-price of a man slain; the old lawyers stand up one after another
+      and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, freshly ploughed fields
+      where ploughmen drive their teams to and fro, the earth growing dark
+      behind the share. The estate of a landowner where laborers are reaping;
+      some armfuls the binders are binding with twisted bands of straw: among
+      them the farmer is standing in silence, leaning on his staff, rejoicing in
+      his heart. Vineyards with purpling clusters and happy folk gathering these
+      in plaited baskets on sunny afternoons. A herd of cattle with incurved
+      horns hurrying from the stable to the woods where there is running water
+      and where purple-topped weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen with
+      white sheep. A dancing-place under the trees; girls and young men dancing,
+      their fingers on one another&rsquo;s wrists: a great company stands watching the
+      lovely dance of joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles as art; as pageants of
+      life they appear on the Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker of old
+      wrought them upon the armor of the Greek warrior in tin and silver, bronze
+      and gold. The world-designer sets them to-day on the throbbing land in
+      nerve and blood, toil and delight and passion. But there with the old
+      things she mingles new things, with the never changing the ever changing;
+      for the old that remains always the new and the new that perpetually
+      becomes old&mdash;these Nature allots to man as his two portions wherewith
+      he must abide steadfast in what he is and go upward or go downward through
+      all that he is to become.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of the many scenes which she in our time sets forth upon the stately
+      grassy Shield there is a single spectacle that she spreads over the length
+      and breadth of it once every year now as best liked by the entire people;
+      and this is both old and new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is old because it contains man&rsquo;s faith in his immortality, which was
+      venerable with age before the shield of Achilles ever grew effulgent
+      before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new because it contains those
+      latest hopes and reasons for this faith, which briefly blossom out upon
+      the primitive stock with the altering years and soon are blown away upon
+      the winds of change. Since this spectacle, this festival, is thus old and
+      is thus new and thus enwraps the deepest thing in the human spirit, it is
+      never forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or sows in the teeth of the
+      wind and glances at the fickle sky; when under the summer shade of a
+      flowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted herds and fattening
+      grain; whether there is autumnal plenty in his barn or autumnal emptiness,
+      autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal strife,&mdash;all days of the
+      year, in the assembly-place, in the dancing-place, whatsoever of good or
+      ill befall in mind or hand, never does one forget.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seems farthest
+      from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when the fields lie shorn
+      between harvest-time and seed-time and man turns wistful eyes back and
+      forth between the mystery of his origin and the mystery of his end,&mdash;then
+      comes the great pageant of the winter solstice, then comes Christmas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differing but
+      always identical mortals?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was once the old pagan festival of dead Nature. It was once the old
+      pagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival when the
+      hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It was the pagan
+      festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants of an upper world
+      upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, and the production of a
+      race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is now the festival of the
+      Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortal children. It is now the
+      new festival of man&rsquo;s remembrance of his errors and his charity toward
+      erring neighbors. It has latterly become the widening festival of
+      universal brotherhood with succor for all need and nighness to all
+      suffering; of good will warring against ill will and of peace warring upon
+      war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the
+      festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it is on
+      the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an age to many
+      people&mdash;the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen; setting forth
+      man&rsquo;s pathetic love of youth&mdash;of his own youth that will not stay
+      with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds its ancient way
+      upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country a few
+      years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the desk
+      near his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing and turned
+      the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of his mental
+      travels&mdash;for such he followed&mdash;was now passing through the
+      evergreens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned there
+      like short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths and
+      customs of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper, as
+      gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the large one. It
+      dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the class of those
+      that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which possess them as
+      unsafe reading for unsafe minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sheets of paper covered with the man&rsquo;s clear, deliberate handwriting lay
+      thickly on the desk. A table in the centre of the room was strewn with
+      volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On the tops of
+      two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representing scenes from
+      the oldest known art of the East. These and other prints hanging about the
+      walls, however remote from each other in the times and places where they
+      had been gathered, brought together in this room of a quiet Kentucky
+      farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object: the subject related in
+      general to trees and in especial evergreens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to be submerged.
+      His left hand was always going out to one or the other of three
+      picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two of these frames held photographs of four young children&mdash;a boy
+      and a girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being well
+      enough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unruly and
+      disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of them looked
+      straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American frankness and good
+      humor; all had mouths shut tight with American energy and determination.
+      Apparently they already believed that the New World was behind them, that
+      the nation backed them up. In a way you believed it. You accepted them on
+      the spot as embodying that marvellous precocity in American children,
+      through which they early in life become conscious of the country and claim
+      it their country and believe that it claims them. Thus they took on the
+      distinction of being a squad detached only photographically from the rank
+      and file of the white armies of the young in the New World, millions and
+      millions strong, as they march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous,
+      magnificent, toward new times and new destinies for the nation and for
+      humanity&mdash;a kinder knowledge of man and a kinder ignorance of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third frame held the picture of a woman probably thirty years of age.
+      Her features were without noticeable American characteristics. What human
+      traits you saw depended upon what human traits you saw with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hair was dark and abundant, the brows dark and strong. And the lashes
+      were dark and strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornily hedged about,
+      somehow brought up before you a picture of autumn thistles&mdash;thistles
+      that look out from the shadow of a rock. They had a veritable thistle
+      quality and suggestiveness: gray and of the fields, sure of their
+      experience in nature, freighted with silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Despite grayness and thorniness, however, you saw that they were in the
+      summer of their life-bloom; and singularly above even their beauty of
+      blooming they held what is rare in the eyes of either men or women&mdash;they
+      held a look of being just.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole face was an oval, long, regular, high-bred. If the lower part
+      had been hidden behind a white veil of the Orient (by that little bank of
+      snow which is guardedly built in front of the overflowing desires of the
+      mouth), the upper part would have given the impression of reserve,
+      coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that one look&mdash;the
+      garnered wisdom, the tempering justice, of the eyes. The whole face being
+      seen, the lower features altered the impression made by the upper ones;
+      reserve became bettered into strength, coldness bettered into dignity,
+      severity of intellect transfused into glowing nobleness of character. The
+      look of virgin justice in her was perhaps what had survived from that
+      white light of life which falls upon young children as from a receding sun
+      and touches lingeringly their smiles and glances; but her mouth had
+      gathered its shadowy tenderness as she walked the furrows of the years,
+      watching their changeful harvests, eating their passing bread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A handful of some of the green things of winter lay before her picture:
+      holly boughs with their bold, upright red berries; a spray of the cedar of
+      the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous blue. When he had come in
+      from out of doors to go on with his work, he had put them there&mdash;perhaps
+      as some tribute. After all his years with her, many and strong, he must
+      have acquired various tributes and interpretations; but to-day, during his
+      walk in the woods, it had befallen him to think of her as holly which
+      ripens amid snows and retains its brave freshness on a landscape of
+      departed things. As cedar also which everywhere on the Shield is the best
+      loved of forest-growths to be the companion of household walls; so that
+      even the poorest of the people, if it does not grow near the spot they
+      build in, hunt for it and bring it home: everywhere wife and cedar, wife
+      and cedar, wife and cedar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The photographs of the children grouped on each side of hers with heads a
+      little lower down called up memories of Old World pictures in which
+      cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet of the heavenly Hebrew maid.
+      Glowing young American mother with four healthy children as her gifts to
+      the nation&mdash;this was the practical thought of her that riveted and
+      held.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has been said, they were in two groups, the children; a boy and girl in
+      each. The four were of nearly the same age; but the faces of two were on a
+      dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced at her again and persuaded
+      yourself that the expression of motherhood which characterized her
+      separated into two expressions (as behind a thin white cloud it is
+      possible to watch another cloud of darker hue). Nearer in time was the
+      countenance of a mother happy with happy offspring; further away the same
+      countenance withdrawn a little into shadow&mdash;the face of the mother
+      bereaved&mdash;mute and changeless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man, the worker, whom this little flock of wife and two surviving
+      children now followed through the world as their leader, sat with his face
+      toward his desk In a corner of the room; solidly squared before his
+      undertaking, liking it, mastering it; seldom changing his position as the
+      minutes passed, never nervously; with a quietude in him that was oftener
+      in Southern gentlemen in quieter, more gentlemanly times. A low powerful
+      figure with a pair of thick shoulders and tremendous limbs; filling the
+      room with his vitality as a heavy passionate animal lying in a corner of a
+      cage fills the space of the cage, so that you wait for it to roll over or
+      get up on its feet and walk about that you may study its markings and get
+      an inkling of its conquering nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime there were hints of him. When he had come in, he had thrown his
+      overcoat on a chair that stood near the table in the centre of the room
+      and had dropped his hat upon his coat. It had slipped to the floor and now
+      lay there&mdash;a low, soft black hat of a kind formerly much worn by
+      young Southerners of the countryside,&mdash;especially on occasions when
+      there was a spur of heat in their mood and going,&mdash;much the same kind
+      that one sees on the heads of students in Rome in winter; light, warm,
+      shaping itself readily to breezes from any quarter, to be doffed or donned
+      as comfortable and negligible. It suggested that he had been a country boy
+      in the land, still belonged to the land, and as a man kept to its
+      out-of-door habits and fashions. His shoes, one of which you saw at each
+      side of his chair, were especially well made for rough-going feet to tramp
+      in during all weathers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped to withdraw your
+      interpretation of him from farm life to the arts or the professions. The
+      scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing against the clear-hued flesh
+      at the back of his neck, and the Van Dyck-like edge of the shirt cuff,
+      defining his powerful wrist and hand, strengthened the notion that he
+      belonged to the arts or to the professions. He might have been sitting
+      before a canvas instead of a desk and holding a brush instead of a pen:
+      the picture would have been true to life. Or truer yet, he might have
+      taken his place with the grave group of students in the Lesson in Anatomy
+      left by Rembrandt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair about, and began to read the
+      page he had just finished: then you saw him. He had a big, masculine,
+      solid-cut, self-respecting, normal-looking, executive head&mdash;covered
+      with thick yellowish hair clipped short; so that while everything else in
+      his appearance indicated that he was in the prime of manhood, the clipped
+      hair caused him to appear still more youthful; and it invested him with a
+      rustic atmosphere which went along very naturally with the sentimental
+      country hat and the all-weather shoes. He seemed at first impression a
+      magnificent animal frankly loved of the sun&mdash;perhaps too warmly. The
+      sun itself seemed to have colored for him his beard and mustache&mdash;a
+      characteristic hue of men&rsquo;s hair and beard in this land peopled from Old
+      English stock. The beard, like the hair, was cut short, as though his idea
+      might have been to get both hair and beard out of life&rsquo;s daily way; but
+      his mustache curled thickly down over his mouth, hiding it. In the whole
+      effect there was a suggestion of the Continent, perhaps of a former
+      student career in Germany, memories of which may still have lasted with
+      him and the marks of which may have purposely been kept up in his
+      appearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But such a fashion of beard, while covering a man&rsquo;s face, does much to
+      uncover the man. As he sat amid his papers and books, your thought surely
+      led again to old pictures where earnest heads bend together over some
+      point on the human road, at which knowledge widens and suffering begins to
+      be made more bearable and death more kind. Perforce now you interpreted
+      him and fixed his general working category: that he was absorbed in work
+      meant to be serviceable to humanity. His house, the members of his family,
+      the people of his neighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere
+      dweller on his farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the
+      race forever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped its
+      responsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests. The
+      look of the student left his face; over it began to play the soft lights
+      of the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for his own place
+      in the world; the student had become the husband and house-father. A few
+      moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his work again, his right hand
+      took up the pen, his left hand went back to the pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he were being
+      watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed. (He had the
+      reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that he is idolized.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immense oak
+      tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminder of
+      vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, the straining
+      and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcries for the wild
+      life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, an image of forest
+      reflection. Once a small black-and-white sapsucker, circling the trunk and
+      peering into the crevices of the bark on a level with the windows, uttered
+      minute notes which penetrated into the room like steel darts of sound. A
+      snowbird alighted on the window-sill, glanced familiarly in at the man,
+      and shot up its crest; but disappointed perhaps that it was not noticed,
+      quoted its resigned gray phrase&mdash;a phrase it had made for itself to
+      accompany the score of gray whiter&mdash;and flitted on billowy wings to a
+      juniper at the corner of the house, its turret against the long javelins
+      of the North.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amid the stillness of Nature outside and the house-silence of a love
+      guarding him within, the man worked on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little clock ticked independently on the old-fashioned Parian marble
+      mantelpiece. Prints were propped against its sides and face, illustrating
+      the use of trees about ancient tombs and temples. Out of this photographic
+      grove of dead things the uncaring clock threw out upon the air a living
+      three&mdash;the fateful three that had been measured for each tomb and
+      temple in its own land and time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A knock, regretful but positive, was heard, and the door opening into the
+      hall was quietly pushed open. A glow lit up the student&rsquo;s face though he
+      did not stop writing; and his voice, while it gave a welcome,
+      unconsciously expressed regret at being disturbed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his heavy figure with instant courtesy&mdash;rather obsolete now&mdash;and
+      bowing to one side, sat down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I see,&rdquo; he said, dipping his pen into his ink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since you did not turn around, you would better have said &lsquo;So I hear.&rsquo; It
+      is three o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said you would be ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said you would be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am done&mdash;nearly done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How nearly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By to-morrow&mdash;to-morrow afternoon before dark. I have reached the
+      end, but now it is hard to stop, hard to let go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His tone gave first place, primary consideration, to his work. The silence
+      in the room suddenly became charged. When the voice was heard again, there
+      was constraint in it:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something to be done this afternoon before dark, something I
+      have a share in. Having a share, I am interested. Being interested, I am
+      prompt. Being prompt, I am here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waved his hand over the written sheets before him&mdash;those cold Alps
+      of learning; and asked reproachfully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you not interested in all this, O you of little faith?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I say, O me of little knowledge!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the words impulsively escaped, he heard a quick movement behind him. He
+      widened out his heavy arms upon his manuscript and looked back over his
+      shoulder at her and laughed. And still smiling and holding his pen between
+      his fingers, he turned and faced her. She had advanced into the middle of
+      the room and had stopped at the chair on which he had thrown his overcoat
+      and hat. She had picked up the hat and stood turning it and pushing its
+      soft material back into shape for his head&mdash;without looking at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The northern light of the winter afternoon, entering through the looped
+      crimson-damask curtains, fell sidewise upon the woman of the picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Years had passed since the picture had been made. There were changes in
+      her; she looked younger. She had effaced the ravages of a sadder period of
+      her life as human voyagers upon reaching quiet port repair the damages of
+      wandering and storm. Even the look of motherhood, of the two motherhoods,
+      which so characterized her in the photograph, had disappeared for the
+      present. Seeing her now for the first time, one would have said that her
+      whole mood and bearing made a single declaration: she was neither wife nor
+      mother; she was a woman in love with life&rsquo;s youth&mdash;with youth&mdash;youth;
+      in love with the things that youth alone could ever secure to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carriage of her beautiful head, brave and buoyant, brought before you
+      a vision of growing things in nature as they move towards their summer yet
+      far away. There still was youth in the round white throat above the collar
+      of green velvet&mdash;woodland green&mdash;darker than the green of the
+      cloth she wore. You were glad she had chosen that color because she was
+      going for a walk with him; and green would enchain the eye out on the sere
+      ground and under the stripped trees. The flecklessness of her long gloves
+      drew your thoughts to winter rather&mdash;to its one beauteous gift
+      dropped from soiled clouds. A slender toque brought out the keenness in
+      the oval of her face. From it rose one backward-sweeping feather of green
+      shaded to coral at the tip; and there your fancy may have cared to see
+      lingering the last radiance of whiter-sunset skies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept his seat with his back to the manuscript from which he had
+      repulsed her; and his eyes swept loyally over her as she waited. Though
+      she could scarcely trust herself to speak, still less could she endure the
+      silence. With her face turned toward the windows opening on the lawn, she
+      stretched out her arm toward him and softly shook his hat at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sun sets&mdash;you remember how many minutes after four,&rdquo; she said,
+      with no other tone than that of quiet warning. &ldquo;I marked the minutes in
+      the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone to bed, so
+      that you would not forget. You know how short the twilights are even when
+      the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will not be any twilight.
+      The children said they would not be at home until after dark, but they may
+      come sooner; it may be a trick. They have threatened to catch us this year
+      in one way or another, and you know they must not do that&mdash;not this
+      year! There must be one more Christmas with all its old ways&mdash;even if
+      it must be without its old mysteries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not reply at once and then not relevantly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard you playing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under his
+      brows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for she held
+      her face averted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater
+      constraint in her voice when it was next heard:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to play; you need not have listened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to listen; you played loud&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown other
+      sounds,&rdquo; she admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What other sounds?&rdquo; His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it was a
+      frank thrust into the unknown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Discords&mdash;possibly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What discords?&rdquo; His thrust became deeper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across her
+      lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hidden
+      trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished,
+      radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a blaze of
+      sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the advancing Figure
+      of Joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the whole familiar picture of him now&mdash;triumphantly painted in
+      the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords&mdash;that
+      drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the
+      self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near losing;
+      and her words issued from behind the closed gates&mdash;as through a
+      crevice of the closed gates:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep
+      grave ones you sent for. It is written by a deep grave German, and it is
+      worked out in the deep grave German way. The whole purpose of it is to
+      show that any woman in the life of any man is merely&mdash;an Incident.
+      She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a briefer time, for a
+      greater time; but all along and in the end, at bottom, she is to him&mdash;an
+      Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were those the discords?&rdquo; he asked gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised his
+      arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of magazines
+      on top of his desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a work,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;not written by a German or by any other man,
+      but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole purpose
+      of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the life of any
+      woman. He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for a briefer time,
+      for a greater time; but all along and in the end, beneath everything else,
+      he is to her&mdash;an Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That did not trouble me,&rdquo; he said tenderly. &ldquo;Those were not discords to
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no
+      comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to
+      whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he
+      turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself
+      from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a year now I
+      have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and at this work&mdash;without
+      any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurred before in our lives.
+      You have shared everything. I have relied upon you and I have needed you,
+      and you have never failed me. And this apparently has been your reward&mdash;to
+      be rudely shut out at last. Now you come in and I tell you that the work
+      is done&mdash;quite finished&mdash;without a word to you about it. Do I
+      not understand?&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;Have I not understood all along? It is
+      true; outwardly as regards this work you have been&mdash;the Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he paused, she made a slight gesture with one hand as though she did
+      not care for what he was saying and brushed away the fragile web of his
+      words from before her eyes&mdash;eyes fixed on larger things lying clear
+      before her in life&rsquo;s distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, comrade of all these years, battler with me for life&rsquo;s victories,
+      did you think you were never to know? Did you believe I was never to
+      explain? You had only one more day to wait! If patience, if faith, could
+      only have lasted another twenty-four hours&mdash;until Christmas Eve!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first time for nearly a year that the sound of those words had
+      been heard in that house. He bent earnestly over toward her; he leaned
+      heavily forward with his hands on his knees and searched her features with
+      loyal chiding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;its secrets for you and
+      me? Think of Christmas Eve for you and me! Remember!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a woodchopper&rsquo;s
+      smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about the hidden
+      life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmosphere near by is
+      clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender haze of old
+      pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noted the effect of his words and did not wait. He turned to his desk
+      and, gathering up the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to cover her
+      picture with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay blinded and bewildered there,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;until the hour comes when
+      holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand; you will
+      then see whether in this work you have been&mdash;the Incident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter afternoon
+      had perceptibly waned in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were
+      tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up
+      between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is getting late,&rdquo; she said in nearly the same tone of quiet warning
+      with which she had spoken before. &ldquo;There is no time to lose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its interrupted
+      work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of her arms, looking
+      at her reverently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides&mdash;the
+      hands that were life, the arms that were love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward over
+      his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache. Then,
+      closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly on his head
+      and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put out one of her
+      hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile over her shoulder
+      to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?&rdquo; she asked,
+      with a struggling sweetness in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve
+      with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the collar:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The trouble is,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;the trouble is that the authors are right
+      and the books are right: men and women <i>are</i> only Incidents to each
+      other in life,&rdquo; and she passed out into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the universe,&rdquo;
+       he replied, &ldquo;if we cared to look at it in that way; but we&rsquo;d better not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly
+      stopped buttoning his overcoat. His eyes began to wander over the books,
+      the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey everything that he
+      had brought together from such distances of place and time. His work was
+      in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of loneliness, came over him as
+      it comes upon all of us who reach the happy ending of toil that we have
+      put our heart and strength in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you coming?&rdquo; she called faintly from the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am coming,&rdquo; he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he stopped
+      again and looked back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was on
+      the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers who
+      join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment that
+      through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which men&mdash;like a
+      crew of sailors&mdash;tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow her into some
+      divine haven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His task was ended. Would it be of service? Would it carry any message?
+      Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth, with the eyes
+      of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable children of the
+      future the better for its shining?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you coming?&rdquo; she called more quiveringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am coming,&rdquo; he called back, breaking away from his revery, and raising
+      his voice so it would surely reach her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the short
+      frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting to be
+      joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed on the
+      doorway for his emerging figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-morrow night,&rdquo; he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his
+      words, &ldquo;to-morrow night you will understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers, &ldquo;to-morrow
+      night I must understand. Until to-morrow night, then, blinded and
+      bewildered with holly and cedar let me be! Kind ignorance, enfold me and
+      spare me! All happiness that I can control or conjecture, come to me and
+      console me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he should
+      step forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what they
+      had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind, and the
+      whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no movement.
+      Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the winter land;
+      it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and beyond
+      the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the distance you
+      distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-grass pastures: white ash
+      and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut and black walnut; and
+      the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the sycamore with her soft
+      leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the hickory brought to mind autumn
+      days when children were abroad, ploughing the myriad leaves with booted
+      feet and gathering their harvest of nuts&mdash;primitive food-storing
+      instinct of the human animal still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts
+      to be put away in garret and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas
+      came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of an
+      axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it would
+      bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of the forest
+      mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be gathering the
+      mistletoe to decorate the house. Near by was a thicket of bramble and cane
+      where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly thrived: the same fingers
+      would be gathering that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had just been
+      shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears ready for
+      the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly to remembrance
+      the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a genial torrent
+      through all days and nights of the year&mdash;many a full-throated rill&mdash;but
+      never with so inundating a movement as at this season. And the same grain
+      suggested also the smokehouses of all farms, in which larded porkers,
+      fattened by it, had taken on posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in
+      which up under the black rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to
+      their needed flavor over well-chosen chips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled,
+      rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble of
+      which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness for the
+      table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the drills at
+      harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn aftermath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where hemp-breakers
+      were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks wagons loaded with
+      the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to the towns, helping to
+      fill the farmer&rsquo;s pockets with holiday largess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the mistletoe&mdash;the
+      holly&mdash;the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty men&mdash;the
+      hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives&mdash;the turkey and the
+      quail&mdash;and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sight there&mdash;the
+      fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into offerings to the
+      dark solstice, the low activities of the soil uplifted to human joyance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One last thing completed the picture of the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day and
+      lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive verdure.
+      Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor larch nor fir is
+      native to these portions of the Shield; only the wild cedar, the shapeless
+      and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage of evergreens was not,
+      then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had been planted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their note of
+      deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape this
+      dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky they waited in
+      beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and spruce which seems always
+      to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; the dim blue-gray of pines
+      which rather belongs to far-vaulted summer skies; and the dark green of
+      firs&mdash;true comfortable winter coat when snows sift mournfully and
+      icicles are spearing earthward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished the
+      picture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied no
+      appetite, they were ministers to no passions; but with them the Christmas
+      of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape their boughs with its
+      gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires the spiritual hope of
+      humanity would take its flight toward the eternal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus then the winter land waited for the oncoming of that strange
+      travelling festival of the world which has roved into it and encamped
+      gypsy-like from old lost countries: the festival that takes toll of field
+      and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup and loaf; but that, best of all, wrings
+      from the nature of man its reluctant tenderness for his fellows and builds
+      out of his lonely doubts regarding this life his faith in a better one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And central on this whole silent scene&mdash;the highest element in it&mdash;its
+      one winter-red passion flower&mdash;the motionless woman waiting outside
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he came out upon the step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though his first thought were of
+      what the weather was going to be. Then as he buttoned the top button of
+      his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down over it to make it more
+      comfortable under his short neck, with his other hand he gave a little
+      pull at his hat&mdash;the romantic country hat; and he peeped out from
+      under the rustic brim at her, smiling with old gayeties and old
+      fondnesses. He bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked so short
+      under the flat headgear that her first thought was how slight a disguise
+      every year turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and she smiled back
+      at him with the same gayeties and fondnesses of days gone by. But such a
+      deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and walked hurriedly down the
+      hill toward the evergreens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was quickly at her side. She could feel how animal youth in him
+      released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was brutal
+      vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as his
+      overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping out of
+      life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down the lawn he
+      halted and laid his hand heavily on her wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to that!&rdquo; he said. His voice was eager, excited, like a boy&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the opposite side of the house, several hundred yards away, the country
+      turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them the rumbling of many
+      vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of the nearest town and moving
+      toward smaller villages scattered over the country; to its hamlets and
+      cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer or poorer&mdash;every vehicle
+      Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of the Southern Yule-tide. There were
+      matters and usages in those American carriages and buggies and wagons and
+      carts the history of which went back to the England of the Georges and the
+      Stuarts and the Henrys; to the England of Elizabeth, to the England of
+      Chaucer; back through robuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred,
+      and on beyond this till they were lost under the forest glooms of
+      Druidical Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood looking into each other&rsquo;s eyes and gathering into their ears
+      the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it all meant&mdash;this
+      far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they saw the whole
+      picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: the atmosphere of
+      it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouring from its chimneys,
+      so that twilight in it had already begun to fall ahead of twilight out in
+      the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along the little streets, and shops
+      to be illuminated to the delight of window-gazing, mystery-loving children&mdash;wild
+      with their holiday excitements and secrecies. Somewhere in the throng
+      their own two children were busy unless they had already started home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For years he had held a professorship in the college in this town, driving
+      in and out from his home; but with the close of this academic year he was
+      to join the slender file of Southern men who have been called to Northern
+      universities: this change would mean the end of life here. Both thought of
+      this now&mdash;of the last Christmas in the house; and with the same
+      impulse they turned their gaze back to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield, a
+      writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its
+      meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of an
+      entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue, he, the
+      song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into the notes of
+      a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world knows it&mdash;the
+      only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of American home life&mdash;embodying
+      the very soul of it in the clear amber of sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low,
+      old-fashioned, brown-walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneys generous,
+      with green window-shutters less than green and white window-sills less
+      than white; with feudal vines giving to its walls their summery
+      allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in the middle years of its
+      strength and its honors; not needy, not wealthy, but answering Agar&rsquo;s
+      prayer for neither poverty nor riches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been the house of his fathers. He had brought her to it as his own
+      on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across the country.
+      They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him in the carriage,
+      one of his arms around her and his other hand enfolding both of hers, she
+      had first caught sight of it through the forest trees&mdash;waiting for
+      her with its lights just lit, its warmth, its privacies: and that had been
+      Christmas Eve!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For her wedding day had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her
+      choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she had
+      clung to it the more positively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the most beautiful night of the year!&rdquo; she had replied, brushing
+      their objection aside with that reason alone. &ldquo;And it is the happiest! I
+      will be married on that night, when I am happiest!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered other words to herself&mdash;yet
+      scarce uttered them, rather felt them:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannot fail us
+      became human. My love for him, which is the divine thing in my life and
+      which is never to fail him, shall become human to him on that night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the carriage had stopped at the front porch, he had led her into the
+      house between the proud smiling servants of his establishment ranged at a
+      respectful distance on each side; and without surrendering her even to her
+      maid&mdash;a new spirit of silence on him&mdash;he had led her to her
+      bedroom, to a place on the carpet under the chandelier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in her
+      youth and loveliness&mdash;<i>for him;</i> come into his house, into his
+      arms&mdash;<i>his</i>; no other&rsquo;s&mdash;never while life lasted to be
+      another&rsquo;s even in thought or in desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of many
+      had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could gather her
+      home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms and set upon
+      her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As his warm breath
+      broke close against her face, his lips under their mustache, almost boyish
+      then, had thoughtlessly formed one little phrase&mdash;one little but most
+      lasting and fateful phrase:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of mistletoe
+      swung from the chandelier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards
+      know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as the
+      first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them most
+      clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow down into
+      the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon the life-sap of
+      the tree. And in all the later years they had been the green spot of
+      verdure under life&rsquo;s dark skies&mdash;the undying bough into which the
+      spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the first problem of learning to weld her nature to his wisely;
+      through the perils of bearing children and the agony of seeing some of
+      them pass away; through the ambition of having him rise in his profession
+      and through the ideal of making his home an earthly paradise; through
+      loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he came back,&mdash;upon her
+      whole life had rested the wintry benediction of that mystical phrase:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned away now, starting once more downward toward the evergreens. He
+      was quickly at her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you suppose Harold and Elizabeth are up to about this time?&rdquo; he
+      asked, with a good-humored jerk of his head toward the distant town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At least to something mischievous, whatever it is,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;They
+      begged to be allowed to stay until the shop windows were lighted; they
+      have seen the shop windows two or three times already this week: there is
+      no great marvel for them now in shop windows. Permission to stay late may
+      be a blind to come home early. They are determined, from what I have
+      overheard, to put an end this year to the parental house mysteries of
+      Christmas. They are crossing the boundary between the first childhood and
+      the second. But if it be possible, I wish everything to be kept once more
+      just as it has always been; let it be so for my sake!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I wish it for your sake,&rdquo; he replied heartily; &ldquo;and for my purposes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment of silence he asked: &ldquo;How large a Tree must it be this
+      year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will have to be large,&rdquo; she replied; and she began to count those for
+      whom the Tree this year was meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First she called the names of the two children they had lost. Gifts for
+      these were every year hung on the boughs. She mentioned their names now,
+      and then she continued counting:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the family come
+      Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor&rsquo;s children. Then the
+      servants&mdash;long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow for the
+      other children who are to make up the Christmas party: ten children have
+      been invited, ten children have accepted, ten children will arrive. The
+      ten will bring with them some unimportant parents; you can judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will do for size,&rdquo; he said, laughing. &ldquo;Now the kind: spruce&mdash;larch&mdash;hemlock&mdash;pine&mdash;which
+      shall it be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It shall be none of them!&rdquo; she answered, after a little waiting. &ldquo;It
+      shall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeer are
+      harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts&mdash;fir. The old Christmas
+      stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in it longest. And deepest
+      mystery darkens the heart of it,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fir it shall be!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Choose the tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have chosen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped and delicately touched his wrist with the finger tips of one
+      white-gloved hand, bidding him stand beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That one,&rdquo; she said, pointing down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens in summer gratefully, but
+      now lying like a band of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near the
+      middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on this island,
+      aloof from its fellows and with space for the growth of its boughs, stood
+      a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering faultlessly,
+      star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered more years&mdash;a tame
+      dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurred with wildness and
+      lapped by low washings of the planet&rsquo;s primeval ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At each Christmas for several years they had been tempted to cut this
+      tree, but had spared it for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the
+      thicket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That one,&rdquo; she now said, pointing down. &ldquo;This is the last time. Let us
+      have the best of things while we may! Is it not always the perfect that is
+      demanded for sacrifice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His glance had already gone forward eagerly to the tree, and he started
+      toward it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Descending, they stepped across the brook to the island and went up close
+      to the fir. With a movement not unobserved by her he held out his hand and
+      clasped three green fingers of a low bough which the fir seemed to stretch
+      out to him recognizingly. (She had always realized the existence of some
+      intimate bond between him and the forest.) His face now filled with
+      meanings she did not share; the spell of the secret work had followed him
+      out of the house down to the trees; incommunicable silence shut him in. A
+      moment later his fingers parted with the green fingers of the fir and he
+      moved away from her side, starting around the tree and studying it as
+      though in delight of fresh knowledge. So she watched him pass around to
+      the other side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he came back where he had started, she was not there. He looked
+      around searchingly; her figure was nowhere in sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood&mdash;waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The valley had memories, what memories! The years came close together
+      here; they clustered as thickly as the trees themselves. Vacant spots
+      among them marked where the Christmas Trees of former years had been cut
+      down. Some of the Trees had been for the two children they had lost. This
+      wandering trail led hither and thither back to the first Tree for the
+      first child: he had stooped down and cut that close to the ground with his
+      mere penknife. When it had been lighted, it had held only two or three
+      candles; and the candle on the top of it had flared level into the
+      infant&rsquo;s hand-shaded eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew that she was making through the evergreens a Pilgrimage of the
+      Years, walking there softly and alone with the feet of life&rsquo;s Pities and a
+      mother&rsquo;s Constancies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited for her&mdash;motionless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley now. Only from the
+      trees came the plaintive twittering of birds which had come in from frozen
+      weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds of the boughs were calling to
+      one another. It was not their song, but their speech; there was no love in
+      it, but there was what for them perhaps corresponds to our sense of ties.
+      It most resembled in human life the brief things that two people, having
+      long lived together, utter to each other when together in a room they
+      prepare for the night: there is no anticipation; it is a confession of the
+      unconfessed. About him now sounded this low winter music from the far
+      boundary of other lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not hear it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light on the landscape had changed. The sun was setting and a splendor
+      began to spread along the sky and across the land. It laid a glory on the
+      roof of the house on the hill; it smote the edge of the woodland pasture,
+      burnishing with copper the gray domes; it shone faintly on distant corn
+      shocks, on the weather-dark tents of the hemp at bivouac soldierly and
+      grim. At his feet it sparkled in rose gleams on the samite of the brook
+      and threw burning shafts into the gloom of the fir beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not hear the calling of the birds about his ears, he did not see
+      the sunset before his eyes, he did not feel the fir tree the boughs of
+      which stuck against his side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood there as still as a rock&mdash;with his secret. Not the secret of
+      the year&rsquo;s work, which was to be divulged to his wife and through her to
+      the world; but the secret which for some years had been growing in his
+      life and which would, he hoped, never grow into the open&mdash;to be seen
+      of her and of all men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sentimental country hat now looked as though it might have been worn
+      purposely to help out a disguise, as the more troubled man behind the
+      scenes makes up to be the happier clown. It became an absurdity, a
+      mockery, above his face grave, stern, set of jaw and eye. He was no longer
+      the student buried among his books nor human brother to toiling brothers.
+      He had not the slightest thought of service to mankind left in him, he was
+      but a man himself with enough to think of in the battle between his own
+      will and blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And behind him among the dark evergreens went on that Pilgrimage of the
+      Years&mdash;with the feet of the Pities and the Constancies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moments passed; he did not stir. Then there was a slight noise on the
+      other side of the tree, and his nature instantly stepped back into his
+      outward place. He looked through the boughs. She had returned and was
+      standing with her face also turned toward the sunset; it was very pale,
+      very still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such darkness had settled on the valley now that the green she wore blent
+      with the green of the fir. He saw only her white face and her white hands
+      so close to the branches that they appeared to rest upon them, to grow out
+      of them: he sadly thought of one of his prints of Egypt of old and of the
+      Lady of the Sacred Tree. Her long backward-sweeping plume of green also
+      blent with the green of the fir&mdash;shade to shade&mdash;and only the
+      coral tip of it remained strongly visible. This matched the last coral in
+      the sunset; and it seemed to rest ominously above her head as a
+      finger-point of the fading light of Nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went quickly around to her. He locked his arms around her and drew her
+      close and held her close; and thus for a while the two stood, watching the
+      flame on the altar of the world as it sank lower, leaving emptiness and
+      ashes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once she put out a hand and with a gesture full of majesty and nobleness
+      waved farewell to the dying fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still without a word he took his arms from around her and turned
+      energetically to the tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pressed the lowest boughs aside and made his way in close to the trunk
+      and struck it with a keen stroke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fir as he drew the axe out made at its gashed throat a sound like that
+      of a butchered, blood-strangled creature trying to cry out too late
+      against a treachery. A horror ran through the boughs; the thousands of
+      leaves were jarred by the death-strokes; and the top of it rocked like a
+      splendid plume too rudely treated in a storm. Then it fell over on its
+      side, bridging blackly the white ice of the brook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stooping, he lifted it triumphantly. He set the butt-end on one of his
+      shoulders and, stretching his arms up, grasped the trunk and held the tree
+      straight in the air, so that it seemed to be growing out of his big
+      shoulder as out of a ledge of rock. Then he turned to her and laughed out
+      in his strength and youth. She laughed joyously back at him, glorying as
+      he did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a robust re-shouldering of the tree to make it more comfortable to
+      carry, he turned and started up the hill toward the house. As she followed
+      behind, the old mystery of the woods seemed at last to have taken bodily
+      possession of him. The fir was riding on his shoulder, its arms met fondly
+      around his neck, its fingers were caressing his hair. And it whispered
+      back jeeringly to her through the twilight:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say farewell to him! He was once yours; he is yours no longer. He dandles
+      the child of the forest on his shoulder instead of his children by you in
+      the house. He belongs to Nature; and as Nature calls, he will always
+      follow&mdash;though it should lead over the precipice or into the flood.
+      Once Nature called him to you: remember how he broke down barriers until
+      he won you. Now he is yours no longer&mdash;say good-by to him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With an imbued terror and desolation, she caught up with him. By a
+      movement so soft that he should not be aware, she plucked him by the coat
+      sleeve on the other side from the fir and held on to him as he strode on
+      in careless joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Halfway up the hill lights began to flash from the windows of the house: a
+      servant was bringing in the lamps. It was at this hour, in just this way,
+      that she had first caught sight of them on that Christmas Eve when he had
+      brought her home after the wedding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hurried around in front of him, wishing to read the expression of his
+      eyes by the distant gleams from the windows. Would they have nothing to
+      say to her about those winter twilight lamps? Did he, too, not remember?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His head and face were hidden; a thousand small spears of Nature bristled
+      between him and her; but he laughed out to her from behind the rampart of
+      the green spears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment a low sound in the distance drew her attention, and
+      instantly alert she paused to listen. Then, forgetting everything else,
+      she called to him with a rush of laughter like that of her mischief-loving
+      girlhood:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick! There they are! I heard the gate shut at the turnpike! They must
+      not catch us! Quick! Quick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurry, then!&rdquo; he cried, as he ran forward, joining his laughter to hers.
+      &ldquo;Open the door for me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After this the night fell fast. The only sounds to be heard in the valley
+      were the minute readjustments of the ice of the brook as it froze tighter
+      and the distressed cries of the birds that had roosted in the fir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the Tree entered the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      During the night it turned bitter cold. When morning came the sky was a
+      turquoise and the wind a gale. The sun seemed to give out light but not
+      heat&mdash;to lavish its splendor but withhold its charity. Moist flesh if
+      it chanced to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter land the
+      tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece of greased metal used as a trap
+      and is caught and held there until the trapper returns or until it starves&mdash;starves
+      with food on its tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farmhand struck it, resisted as
+      rock. In the fetlocks of farm horses, as they moved shivering, balls of
+      ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little roughnesses of woodland paths
+      snapped off beneath the slow-searching hoofs of fodder-seeking cattle like
+      points of glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within their wool the sheep were comforted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On higher fields which had given back their moisture to the atmosphere and
+      now were dry, the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals and dragged
+      it away in flaunting yellow veils. The picture it made, being so
+      ill-seasoned, led you to think of August drought when the grasshopper
+      stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is hot in the nostrils
+      and every bird holds its beak open and its wings lifted like cooling
+      lattices alongside its breast. In these veils of dust swarms of frost
+      crystals sported&mdash;dead midgets of the dead North. Except crystal and
+      dust and wind, naught moved out there; no field mouse, no hare nor lark
+      nor little shielded dove. In the naked trees of the pasture the crow kept
+      his beak as unseen as the owl&rsquo;s; about the cedars of the yard no scarlet
+      feather warmed the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house on the hill&mdash;one of the houses whose spirit had been blown
+      into the amber of the poet&rsquo;s song&mdash;sent festal smoke out of its
+      chimneys all day long. At intervals the radiant faces of children appeared
+      at the windows, hanging wreaths of evergreens; or their figures flitted to
+      and fro within as they wove garlands on the walls for the Christmas party.
+      At intervals some servant with head and shoulders muffled in a
+      bright-colored shawl darted trippingly from the house to the cabins in the
+      yard and from the cabins back to the house&mdash;the tropical African&rsquo;s
+      polar dance between fire and fire. By every sign it gave the house showed
+      that it was marshalling its whole happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing only seemed to make a signal of distress from afar. The oak tree
+      beside the house, whose roots coiled warmly under the hearth-stones and
+      whose boughs were outstretched across the roof, seemed to writhe and rock
+      in its winter sleep with murmurings and tossings like a human dreamer
+      trying to get rid of an unhappy dream. Imagination might have said that
+      some darkest tragedy of forests long since gone still lived in this lone
+      survivor&mdash;that it struggled to give up the grief and guilt of an
+      ancient forest shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather moderated in the afternoon. A warm current swept across the
+      upper atmosphere, developing everywhere behind it a cloud; and toward
+      sundown out of this cloud down upon the Shield snow began to fall. Not the
+      large wet flakes which sometimes descend too late in spring upon the buds
+      of apple orchards; nor those mournfuller ones which drop too soon on dim
+      wild violets in November woods, but winter snow, stern sculptor of Arctic
+      solitudes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all over the Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Softly the snow fell upon the year&rsquo;s footprints and pathways of children
+      and upon schoolhouses now closed and riotously deserted. More softly upon
+      too crowded asylums for them: houses of noonday darkness where eyes
+      eagerly look out at the windows but do not see; houses of soundlessness
+      where ears listen and do not hear any noise; houses of silence where lips
+      try to speak but utter no word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The snow of Christmas Eve was falling softly on the old: whose eyes are
+      always seeing vanished faces, whose ears hear voices gentler than any the
+      earth now knows, whose hands forever try to reach other hands vainly held
+      out to them. Sad, sad to those who remember loved ones gone with their
+      kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But sadder yet for those who live on together after kindnesses have
+      ceased, or whose love went like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve to
+      them! Dark its snow and blinding!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a shaded lamp&mdash;the
+      only light in the room. Her face, always calm in life&rsquo;s wisdom, but
+      agitated now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in toward her,
+      rested clear-cut upon the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She placed the lamp on a table near the door and seated herself beside it.
+      But she pushed the lamp away unconsciously as though the light of the
+      house were no longer her light; and she sat in the chair as though it were
+      no longer her chair; and she looked about the room as though it were no
+      longer hers nor the house itself nor anything else that she cared for
+      most.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Earlier in the evening they had finished hanging the presents on the Tree;
+      but then an interruption had followed: the children had broken profanely
+      in upon them, rending the veil of the house mysteries; and for more than
+      an hour the night had been given up to them. Now the children were asleep
+      upstairs, already dreaming of Christmas Morn and the rush for the
+      stockings. The servants had finished their work and were gone to their
+      quarters out in the yard. The doors of the house were locked. There would
+      be no more intrusion now, no possible interruption; all the years were to
+      meet him and her&mdash;alone. For Life is the master dramatist: when its
+      hidden tragedies are ready to utter themselves, everything superfluous
+      quits the stage; it is the essential two who fill it! And how little the
+      rest of the world ever hears of what takes place between the two!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little while before he had left the room with the step-ladder; when he
+      came back, he was to bring with him the manuscript&mdash;the silent
+      snowfall of knowledge which had been deepening about him for a year. The
+      time had already passed for him to return, but he did not come. Was there
+      anything in the forecast of the night that made him falter? Was he
+      shrinking&mdash;<i>him</i> shrink? She put away the thought as a strange
+      outbreak of injustice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How still it was outside the house with the snow falling! How still
+      within! She began to hear the ticking of the tranquil old clock under the
+      stairway out in the hall&mdash;always tranquil, always tranquil. And then
+      she began to listen to the disordered strokes of her own heart&mdash;that
+      red Clock in the body&rsquo;s Tower whose beats are sent outward along the
+      streets and alleys of the blood; whose law it is to be alternately wound
+      too fast by the fingers of Joy, too slow by the fingers of Sorrow; and
+      whose fate, if it once run down, never afterwards either by Joy or Sorrow
+      to be made to run again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last she could hear the distant door of his study open and close and
+      his steps advance along the hall. With what a splendid swing and tramp he
+      brought himself toward her!&mdash;with what self-unconsciousness and
+      virile strength in his feet! His steps entered and crossed his bedroom,
+      entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he stood there before her in the
+      parlor doorway, a few yards off&mdash;stopped and regarded her intently,
+      smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment she realized what had delayed him. When he had gone away with
+      the step-ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behind locked doors,
+      he had been working all the afternoon at the decorations of the Tree. Now
+      he came back ceremoniously dressed; the rest of the night was to be in her
+      honor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had always been so on this anniversary of their bridal night. They had
+      always dressed for it; the children now in their graves had been dressed
+      for it; the children in bed upstairs were regularly dressed for it; the
+      house was dressed for it; the servants were dressed for it; the whole life
+      of that establishment had always been made to feel by honors and
+      tendernesses and gayeties that this was the night on which he had married
+      her and brought her home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as never before how these
+      anniversaries had not taken his youth away, but had added youth to him; he
+      had grown like the evergreen in the middle of the room&mdash;with increase
+      of trunk and limbs and with larger tides of strength surging through him
+      toward the master sun. There were no ravages of married life in him. Time
+      had merely made the tree more of a tree and made his youth more youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took in momentary details of his appearance: a moisture like summer
+      heat along the edge of his yellow hair, started by the bath into which he
+      had plunged; the freshness of the enormous hands holding the manuscript;
+      the muscle of the forearm bulging within the dress-coat sleeve. Many a
+      time she had wondered how so perfect an animal as he had ever climbed to
+      such an elevation of work; and then had wondered again whether any but
+      such an animal ever in life does so climb&mdash;shouldering along with him
+      the poise and breadth of health and causing the hot sun of the valley to
+      shine on the mountain tops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed in her honor, thus but
+      the larger youth after all their years together, would return her greeting
+      with a light in his eyes that had always made them so beautiful to her&mdash;a
+      light burning as at a portal opening inward for her only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes rested on his manuscript.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He brought it wrapped and tied in the true holiday spirit&mdash;sprigs of
+      cedar and holly caught in the ribands; and he now lifted and held it out
+      to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems. Then he stepped
+      forward and put it on the table at her elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you!&rdquo; he said reverently, stepping back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been years when, returning from a tramp across the country, he
+      would bring her perhaps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or a brilliant
+      autumn leaf for her throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you!&rdquo; he would say; and then, before he could give it to her, he
+      would throw it away and take her in his arms. Afterwards she would pick up
+      the trifle and treasure it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you!&rdquo; he now said, offering her the treasure of his year&rsquo;s toil and
+      stepping back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the weight of the gift fell on her heart like a stone. She did not look
+      at it or touch it but glanced up at him. He raised his finger, signalling
+      for silence; and going to the chimney corner, brought back a long taper
+      and held it over the lamp until it ignited. Then with a look which invited
+      her to follow, he walked to the Tree and began to light the candles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began at the lowest boughs and, passing around, touched them one by
+      one. Around and around he went, and higher and higher twinkled the lights
+      as they mounted the tapering sides of the fir. At the top he kindled one
+      highest red star, shining down on everything below. Then he blew out the
+      taper, turned out the lamp; and returning to the tree, set the heavy end
+      of the taper on the floor and grasped it midway, as one might lightly hold
+      a stout staff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room, lighted now by the common glow of the candles, revealed itself
+      to be the parlor of the house elaborately decorated for the winter
+      festival. Holly wreaths hung in the windows; the walls were garlanded;
+      evergreen boughs were massed above the window cornices; on the white lace
+      of window curtains many-colored autumn leaves, pressed and kept for this
+      night, looked as though they had been blown there scatteringly by October
+      winds. The air of the room was heavy with odors; there was summer warmth
+      in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the middle of the room stood the fir tree itself, with its top close to
+      the ceiling and its boughs stretched toward the four walls of the room
+      impartially&mdash;as symbolically to the four corners of the earth. It
+      would be the only witness of all that was to take place between them: what
+      better could there be than this messenger of silence and wild secrecy?
+      From the mountains and valleys of the planet its race had looked out upon
+      a million generations of men and women; and the calmness of its lot
+      stretched across the turbulence of human passion as an ancient bridge
+      spans a modern river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the apex of the Tree a star shone. Just beneath at the first forking of
+      the boughs a candle burned. A little lower down a cross gleamed. Under the
+      cross a white dove hung poised, its pinions outstretched as though
+      descending out of the infinite upon some earthly object below. From many
+      of the branches tiny bells swung. There were little horns and little
+      trumpets. Other boughs sagged under the weight of silvery cornucopias.
+      Native and tropical fruits were tied on here and there; and dolls were
+      tied on also with cords around their necks, their feet dangling. There
+      were smiling masks, like men beheaded and smiling in their death. Near the
+      base of the Tree there was a drum. And all over the Tree from pinnacle to
+      base glittered a tinsel like golden fleece&mdash;looking as the moss of
+      old Southern trees seen at yellow sunset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation of it. This year at his own
+      request the decorations had been left wholly to him; now he seemed
+      satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to her eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember what took place on Christmas Eve last year?&rdquo; he asked,
+      with a reminiscent smile. &ldquo;You sat where you are sitting and I stood where
+      I am standing. After I had finished lighting the Tree, do you remember
+      what you said?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment she stirred and passed her fingers across her brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Recall it to me,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I must have said many things. I did not
+      know that I had said anything that would be remembered a year. Recall it
+      to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You looked at the Tree and said what a mystery it is. When and where did
+      it begin, how and why?&mdash;this Tree that is now nourished in the
+      affections of the human family round the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; I remember that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I resolved to find out for you. I determined to prepare during what hours
+      I could spare from my regular college work the gratification of your wish
+      for you as a gift from me. If I could myself find the way back through the
+      labyrinth of ages, then I would return for you and lead you back through
+      the story of the Christmas Tree as that story has never been seen by any
+      one else. All this year&rsquo;s work, then, has been the threading of the
+      labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again, my work is finished, my gift
+      to you is ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made this announcement and stopped, leaving it to clear the air of
+      mystery&mdash;the mystery of the secret work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he resumed: &ldquo;Have you, then, been the Incident in this toil as
+      yesterday you intimated that you were? Do you now see that you have been
+      the whole reason of it? You were excluded from any share in the work only
+      because you could not help to prepare your own gift! That is all. What has
+      looked like a secret in this house has been no secret. You are blinded and
+      bewildered no longer; the hour has come when holly and cedar can speak for
+      themselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sunlight broke out all over his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no reply but said within herself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has nothing to do with the trouble.
+      The secret of the house is not a misunderstanding; it is life. It is not
+      the doing of a year; it is the undoing of the years. It is not a gift to
+      enrich me with new happiness; it is a lesson that leaves me poorer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on without pausing:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is already late. The children interrupted us and took up part of your
+      evening. But it is not too late for me to present to you some little part
+      of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a short story out of the long
+      one. The whole long story is there,&rdquo; he added, directing his eyes toward
+      the manuscript at her elbow; and his voice showed how he felt a scholar&rsquo;s
+      pride in it. &ldquo;From you it can pass out to the world that celebrates
+      Christmas and that often perhaps asks the same question: What is the
+      history of the Christmas Tree? But now my story for you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a moment,&rdquo; she said, rising. She left the package where it was; and
+      with feet that trembled against the soft carpet crossed the room and
+      seated herself at one end of a deep sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gathering her dignity about her, she took there the posture of a listener&mdash;listening
+      at her ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sofa was of richly carved mahogany. Each end curved into a scroll like
+      a landward wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms rested on one of
+      the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small table on which
+      stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it profuse crimson
+      carnations hung their heads. They were one of her favorite winter flowers,
+      and he had had these sent out to her this afternoon from a hothouse of the
+      distant town by a half-frozen messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson
+      brocade swept down the wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window
+      cornices. At her back were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of
+      the sofa her piano stood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to
+      him, or played with thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music
+      also which she many a time read; as Beethoven&rsquo;s Great Nine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to window curtain
+      there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put there by the
+      children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoon they had
+      fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree felled the day
+      before&mdash;they knowing nothing, happy children!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There she reclined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness over which
+      points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in some too warm a
+      night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and the blackness of
+      her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare arms and shoulders and
+      faultless neck and faultless throat bared also. Not far away was hid the
+      warm foam-white thigh, curved like Venus&rsquo;s of old out of the sea&rsquo;s
+      inaccessible purity. About her wrists garlands of old family corals were
+      clasped&mdash;the ocean&rsquo;s roses; and on her breast, between the night of
+      her gown and the dawn of the flesh, coral buds flowered in beauty that
+      could never be opened, never be rifled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two aged house-dogs&mdash;setters
+      with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle breeding&mdash;had followed
+      her and lain down at her feet; and one with a thrust of his nose pushed
+      her skirts back from the toe of her slipper and rested his chin on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will listen,&rdquo; she said, shrinking as yet from other speech. &ldquo;I wish
+      simply to listen. There will be time enough afterwards for what I have to
+      say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall go straight through,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;One minute now while I
+      put together the story for you: it is hard to make a good short story out
+      of so vast a one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During these moments of waiting she saw a new picture of him. Under stress
+      of suffering and excitement discoveries denied to calmer hours often
+      arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a shock that causes it to
+      yawn and open its abysses: at the bottom we see new things: sometimes
+      creating new happiness; sometimes old happiness is taken away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stood there&mdash;the man beside the Tree&mdash;into the picture
+      entered three other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on the
+      walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale the
+      mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the
+      reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central portions
+      where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the rocks:
+      Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing and
+      fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and children. With
+      his passion for the wilderness&mdash;its game, enemies, campfire and
+      cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely, stern, gaunt face,
+      no modern expression in it whatsoever&mdash;the timeless face of the
+      woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of the family. This
+      man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi the central counties;
+      and wherever his power had reached, he had used it on a great scale for
+      the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer, field-maker; working to
+      bring in the period on the Shield when the hand of a man began to grasp
+      the plough instead of the rifle, when the stallion had replaced the stag,
+      and bellowing cattle wound fatly down into the pastures of the bison. This
+      man had the face of his caste&mdash;the countenance of the Southern
+      slave-holding feudal lord. Not the American face, but the Southern face of
+      a definite era&mdash;less than national, less than modern; a face not
+      looking far in any direction but at things close around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with his
+      contemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of the
+      Shield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie with remnants
+      of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near this house. This immediate
+      forefather bore the countenance that began to develop in the Northerner
+      and in the Southerner after the Civil War: not the Northern look nor the
+      Southern look, but the American look&mdash;a new thing in the American
+      face, indefinable but unmistakable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of the
+      line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of them in his
+      own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the woods as an
+      implement. In his own case, the woods around him having disappeared, the
+      ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern
+      forestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professorship his
+      original researches in this field began to attract attention. These had to
+      do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation to South Appalachian
+      civilization and thus to that of the continent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from his own
+      college and country to a Northern university.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of an
+      ancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into that
+      of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into the modern
+      American face unlike any other; now finally in him the national American
+      look had broadened into something more modern still&mdash;the look of mere
+      humanity: he did not look like an American&mdash;he looked like a man in
+      the service of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself to her as
+      one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how the past had
+      swept him along with its current; and of how the future now caught him up
+      and bore him on, part in its problems. The old passion living on in him&mdash;forest
+      life; a new passion born in him&mdash;human life. And by inexorable logic
+      these two now blending themselves to-night in a story of the Christmas
+      Tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces something intensely
+      personal to which she could cling; and she did it in this wise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they would go
+      out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; she leading
+      him this way and that way and laying upon him beautiful exactions and
+      tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not do this and not do
+      that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her down the
+      lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summer evening
+      woods; and there on the roots of some old tree&mdash;the shadows of the
+      forest behind them and the light of the western sky in their faces&mdash;they
+      would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes from each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The burning horizon became a cathedral interior&mdash;the meeting of
+      love&rsquo;s holiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil upon
+      the low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses and turf
+      of the Shield under them. The warmth of his body was as the day&rsquo;s sunlight
+      stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like its tawny bloom,
+      native to the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life with him was enchanted madness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write on the
+      air of the room. Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his classroom
+      when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standing at the
+      blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of his lecture for the
+      students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as he finished each word,
+      he read it aloud to her:
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK&rdquo;
+     </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV. THE WANDERING TALE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Josephine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of it
+      float over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls of the
+      room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a spring
+      morning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. I
+      have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question the
+      blossoms in your questioning way&mdash;you who are always wishing to probe
+      the heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of their
+      significance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragrant trumpets
+      could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It was where the
+      filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of a dead past that
+      you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces of their philosophy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modern man
+      to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of the vine;
+      the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach of life; and the
+      point where it clamors for satisfaction is at the greatest possible
+      distance from its birthplace. For all these instincts send their roots
+      down through the mould of the uncivilized, down through the mould of the
+      primitive, down into the mould of the underhuman&mdash;that ancient
+      playhouse dedicated to low tragedies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of the
+      story, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are to
+      ourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kind of
+      father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beings we are
+      to our fellow beings&mdash;the passions which swell as with sap the buds
+      of those relations until they burst into their final shapes of conduct are
+      fed from the bottom of the world&rsquo;s mould. You and I to-night are building
+      the structures of our moral characters upon life-piles that sink into
+      fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our drinking cups into a vast
+      delta sweeping majestically towards the sea and catch drops trickling from
+      the springs of creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that my
+      story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human nature
+      as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have wrested it from
+      this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house on this Night of
+      the Nativity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made the scholar&rsquo;s pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy
+      narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling the
+      story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid Alpine
+      snows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of the
+      human race is the sea. It is true that man in some ancestral form was
+      rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the islanded
+      Greeks said of near Venus. Traces of this origin he still bears both in
+      his body and his emotions; and together they make up his first set of
+      memories&mdash;Sea Memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single
+      picturesque phrase:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which the
+      hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are
+      sounding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Next he told her how man&rsquo;s last marine ancestor quit one day the sea never
+      again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach and entered
+      the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, soft to impressions,
+      the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shape it over from sea
+      uses to forest uses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at the sea-shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remodelled the shell as so much clay; stood it up and twisted and
+      branched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron;
+      tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble; painted
+      it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it up as a life
+      tower&mdash;the world&rsquo;s one beacon: steadily sending it onward through one
+      trial form after another until at last had been perfected for it that
+      angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to sob and to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and entered the
+      forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared at the
+      edge of the forest the creature it had made. On every wall of its being
+      internal and external forest-written; and completely forest-minded: having
+      nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling, forest dreams, forest
+      fancies, forest faith; so that in all it could do or know or feel or dream
+      or imagine or believe it was forest-tethered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelled to
+      emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had been driven to
+      quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn of our history of
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if the first set of race memories&mdash;Sea Memories&mdash;still
+      endure within him, how much more powerful are the second set&mdash;the
+      Forest Memories!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished as
+      forest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant races on
+      the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether and will
+      become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerful that
+      those highest races which have been longest out in the open&mdash;as our
+      own Aryan race&mdash;have never ceased to be reached by the influence of
+      the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning trees falling
+      across the mortal clearings toward the sunset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlike generations
+      of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuated affections which we
+      call in ourselves the Love of Nature; these affections are inherited: new
+      feelings for nature we have none. The writers of our day who speak of
+      civilized man&rsquo;s love of nature as a developing sense err wholly. They are
+      like explorers who should mistake a boundary for the interior of a
+      continent. Man&rsquo;s knowledge of nature is modern, but it no more endows him
+      with new feeling than modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new
+      bone or his latest knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an
+      additional artery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are Forest Memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, that
+      contains the separate buried root of the story: Man&rsquo;s Forest Faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it had
+      planted in him&mdash;there to grow forever&mdash;the root of faith that he
+      was a forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the
+      science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To himself
+      forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be his
+      immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the Greeks in
+      their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were descended from
+      the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race is tethered to the
+      world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this forest faith sprang up and
+      flourished: every race was tethered to some ancestral tree. In the Orient
+      each succeeding Buddha of Indian mythology was tethered to a different
+      tree; each god of the later classical Pantheon was similarly tethered:
+      Jupiter to the oak, Apollo to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to
+      the olive, Juno to the apple, on and on. Forest worship was universal&mdash;the
+      most impressive and bewildering to modern science that the human spirit
+      has ever built up. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the
+      Trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the ages
+      toward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew with his
+      growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successive scythes of
+      time; but always new sprouts were put forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodily presence
+      within the forest; but one final day the forest lost the Immortal as its
+      indwelling creator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next the old forest worshipper peopled the trees with an intermediate race
+      of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long he beguiled
+      himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; but the lesser
+      could not maintain themselves in temples from which the greater had
+      already been expelled, and they too passed out of sight down the roadway
+      of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and during yet
+      later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woods became
+      freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals of his own race
+      had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations of the gods. Then
+      this last panorama of illusion faded also, and civilized man stood face to
+      face with the modern woods&mdash;inhabitated only by its sap and cells.
+      The trees had drawn their bark close around them, wearing an inviolate
+      tapestry across those portals through which so many a stranger to them had
+      passed in and passed out; and henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest&mdash;its
+      one reply to all man&rsquo;s questionings&mdash;became the Voice of its own
+      Mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. But we
+      must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of human
+      life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own Indo-European race
+      dwells as it were on the forest edge. And the forest still reaches out and
+      twines itself around our deepest spiritual truths: home&mdash;birth&mdash;love&mdash;prayer&mdash;death:
+      it tries to overrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our
+      houses, instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and
+      to shelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countries
+      whenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature; in
+      our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonies with
+      garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped hi
+      cathedral stone&mdash;memory of the grove, God&rsquo;s first temple; and when we
+      die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of our rest.
+      Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some obscure
+      instinct in us that it is God-forsaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for his
+      spirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf and
+      tendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every later
+      world-worship; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into the ritual of
+      Christianity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence at the
+      Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man worshipping the tree as the
+      Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we see him using that
+      tree in the worship of the creative Father&rsquo;s Son come to earth in the
+      Father&rsquo;s stead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brief tapers of
+      the night; but on it rests also the long light of that spiritual dawn when
+      man began his Adoration of the Trees. It is the forest taking its place
+      once more beside the long-lost Immortal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should address her
+      thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual for them.
+      For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the ground of his
+      lectures, and she shared his thought before it reached others. It was
+      their high and equal comradeship. Wherever his mind could go hers went&mdash;a
+      brilliant torch, a warming sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on a
+      motionless figure of stone. If he was sensible of this change in her, he
+      gave no sign. And after a moment he passed to the remaining part of the
+      story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thus far I have been speaking to you of the bare tree in wild nature:
+      here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you that they
+      too are Forest Memories&mdash;that since the evergreen moved over into the
+      service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds these Forest
+      Memories have followed it and have alighted amid its branches. Everything
+      here has its story. I am going to tell you in each case what that story
+      is; I am going to interpret everything on the Christmas Tree and the other
+      Christmas decorations in the room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him and never
+      afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoe would have
+      its; he must interpret that: and thus he himself unexpectedly had brought
+      about the situation she wished. She would meet him at that symbolic bough:
+      there be rendered the Judgment of the Years! And now as one sits down at
+      some point of a road where a traveller must arrive, she waited for him
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest
+      worshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his
+      offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in
+      offering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man had
+      learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive
+      custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during that
+      immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set one stone
+      on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove&mdash;the only
+      cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was prayer. So
+      that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the Christmas Tree
+      it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of primitive man and is as
+      ancient as forest worship itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of the fir.
+      This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of Bethlehem
+      which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the Night of the
+      Nativity&mdash;the Star of the New Born. But modern discoveries show that
+      the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or five thousand years before
+      the Christian era; and as far back as they have been traced, we find the
+      wise men of the East worshipping this same star and being guided by it in
+      their spiritual wanderings as they searched for the incarnation of the
+      Divine. They worshipped it as the star of peace and goodness and purity.
+      Many a pious Wolfram in those dim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn
+      to the same star, for love of some Chaldean Elizabeth&mdash;both he and
+      she blown about the desert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on
+      these records the star and the Tree are brought together as here side by
+      side. And the story of the star leads backward to one of the first things
+      that man ever worshipped as he looked beyond the forest: the light of the
+      heavens floating in the depth of space&mdash;light that he wanted but
+      could not grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the next object on the Tree&mdash;the candle under the star&mdash;and
+      went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at the end of ages having
+      caught this light&mdash;having brought it down in the language of his myth
+      from heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in space as having become
+      a star in his hand&mdash;the candle: the star worshipper had now become
+      also the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back to the fire
+      worshippers of ancient Persia&mdash;those highlands of the spirit seeking
+      light. We think of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merely borrowed
+      from the candle of the altar for the purpose of illumination; but the use
+      of it goes back to a time when the forest worshipper, now also the fire
+      worshipper, hung his lights on the trees, having no other altar. Far down
+      toward modern times the temples of the old Prussians, for example, were
+      oak groves, and among them a hierarchy of priests was ordained to keep the
+      sacred fire perpetually burning at the root of the sacred oak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the third object on the tree&mdash;the cross under the candle&mdash;and
+      went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event: Calvary
+      and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw and the
+      apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that age thought of the
+      cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Paul and the rest went
+      down into their graves without so regarding it. The Magdalene never clung
+      to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out at the foot of it the benizon
+      of her tears. Not until the third century after Christ did the Bishops
+      assembled at Nice announce it a Christian symbol. But it was a sacred
+      emblem in the dateless antiquity of Egypt. To primitive man it stood for
+      that sacred light and fire of life which was himself. For he himself is a
+      cross&mdash;the first cross he has ever known. The faithful may truly
+      think of the Son of Man as crucified as the image of humanity. And thus
+      ages before Christ, cross worship and forest worship were brought
+      together: for instance, among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs
+      of which made with the trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on
+      these three they cut the names of three of their gods and this was
+      holy-cross wood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on the tree&mdash;the
+      dove under the cross, and went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white dove of
+      the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the heavens were
+      opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends, overshadowing the Grail.
+      But ages before Christ the prolific white dove of Syria was worshipped
+      throughout the Orient as the symbol of reproductive Nature: and to this
+      day the Almighty is there believed to manifest himself under this form. In
+      ancient Mesopotamia the divine mother of nature is often represented with
+      this dove as having actually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand.
+      And here again forest worship early became associated with the worship of
+      the dove; for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove
+      nurtured in the oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and
+      its wings an omen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story of each
+      backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each was entwined
+      with forest worship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, he said,
+      was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of the vine.
+      And vine worship was forest worship. Moreover, in the same oak grove at
+      Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and their tinklings also were
+      sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boy beats on Christmas Day,
+      was beaten ages before Christ in the worship of Confucius: the story of it
+      dies away toward what was man&rsquo;s first written music in forgotten China. In
+      the first century of the Christian era, on one of the most splendid of the
+      old Buddhist sculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the
+      worship of the sacred tree&mdash;once more showing how music passed into
+      the service of forest faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram&rsquo;s horn&mdash;the
+      primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and used also to pour
+      out the last product of the vine in honor of the vine itself&mdash;the
+      forest&rsquo;s first goblet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldest of
+      all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learned to
+      shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could at least bring
+      to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring, the wild fruit of
+      autumn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept on until only three things on the Tree were left uninterpreted;
+      the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that he had left these
+      to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the most trivial but really
+      the most grave; for by means of them most clearly could be traced the
+      presence of great law running through the progress of humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping it like
+      a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course of ages it
+      had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forest worship: a
+      once universal custom of adorning the tree with everything most precious
+      to the giver in token of his sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Even in
+      Jeremiah is an account of the lading of the sacred tree with gold and
+      ornaments. Herodotus relates that when Xerxes was invading Lydia, on the
+      march he saw a divine tree and had it honored with golden robes and gifts.
+      Livy narrates that when Romulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal
+      City, he hung rich spoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this
+      custom of decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until
+      we can meet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden
+      Fleece and in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Now the custom
+      has dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree&mdash;the mock
+      sacrifice for the real.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind their
+      mockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing
+      prisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forest
+      worship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this to have
+      been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes. In the course of time,
+      when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mock countenance
+      replaced the real.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others, its
+      long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificing children in
+      forest worship. How common this custom was the early literature of the
+      human race too abundantly testifies. We encounter the trace of it in
+      Abraham&rsquo;s sacrifice of Isaac&mdash;arrested by the command of Jehovah. But
+      Abraham would never have thought of slaying his son to propitiate his God,
+      had not the custom been well established. In the case of Jephthah&rsquo;s
+      daughter the sacrifice was actually allowed. We come upon the same custom
+      in the fate of Iphigenia&mdash;at a critical turning point in the world&rsquo;s
+      mercy; in her stead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac&rsquo;s case, was
+      accepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against the
+      inhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock for the
+      real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of the Christmas
+      Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive rites only these
+      playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of the innocent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All the
+      little stories, like pathways running backward into the distance and ever
+      converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forest worship and
+      they met in some sacrifice by the human heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Tree is
+      all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper could not
+      worship without giving, because to worship is to give: therefore he
+      brought his gifts to the forest&mdash;his first altar. These gifts,
+      remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were his sacrifices
+      and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since, the same law
+      lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed the better to the worse;
+      in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to the best. If the race
+      should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, it would still have to
+      worship what is highest in human nature and so worshipping, it would still
+      be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice become the law of self-sacrifice:
+      it would still be necessary to offer up what is low in us to what is
+      higher. Only one portion of mankind has ever believed in Jerusalem; but
+      every religion has known its own Calvary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited her appreciation. She
+      had sat watching him without a movement and without a word. But when at
+      last she asked him a question, she spoke as a listener who wakens from a
+      long revery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you finished the story for me?&rdquo; she inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have finished the story for you,&rdquo; he replied without betraying
+      disappointment at her icy reception of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head,
+      turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throat
+      showed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays of
+      mistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not interpreted this,&rdquo; she said, her mind fixed on that sole
+      omission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not explained that,&rdquo; he admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest toward the
+      manuscript on the table across the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you explained it there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not explained it there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why?&rdquo; she said with disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why, Frederick?&rdquo; she inquired, startled into wonderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled: &ldquo;If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why do you not wish to tell me the story?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered with warning frankness: &ldquo;If you once saw it as a picture, the
+      picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life
+      darkly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She protested: &ldquo;If it is dark to you, why should I not share the darkness
+      of it? Have we not always looked at life&rsquo;s shadows together? And thus
+      seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us and dark
+      things but half as dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He merely repeated his warning: &ldquo;It is a story of a crueler age than ours.
+      It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered: &ldquo;So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to take
+      seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from the forest
+      worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not printed in books?
+      Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in libraries to be read?
+      If others read them, may not I? And since when must I begin to dread
+      anything in books? Or anything in life? And since when did we begin to
+      look at life apart, we who have always looked at it with four eyes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things to
+      see with two, and things to see with none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
+      mistletoe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me the story of this!&rdquo; she pleaded as though she demanded a right.
+      As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they closed and
+      went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the white pearls of
+      the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and were broken apart and
+      rolled across her breast into her lap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked grave; silence or speech&mdash;which were better for her?
+      Either, he now saw, would give her pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happily the story is far away from us,&rdquo; he said, as though he were half
+      inclined to grant her request.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you brought
+      the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the dove and the
+      others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me! Steep me in it as
+      you have steeped yourself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held back a long time: &ldquo;You who are so safe in good, why know evil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frederick,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;I shall have to insist upon your telling me this
+      story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know. Then tell
+      it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give each heavy
+      part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty&mdash;and truth be truth!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
+      change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into the
+      narrative of the historian:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
+      Palestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening by
+      the blue Ægean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals&mdash;the living
+      images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful eternity of
+      Art&mdash;Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in the temple
+      at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little children who
+      were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown soldiers of
+      Cæsar&rsquo;s legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the sacred grove of
+      Dodona,&mdash;where the motions of oak boughs were auguries, and the
+      flappings of the wings of white doves were divine messages, and the
+      tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine meanings,&mdash;in this grove
+      the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of Ephesus, were once a year
+      appointed to undergo similar rites. To the south Pompeii, with its night
+      laughter and song sounding far out toward the softly lapping Mediterranean
+      and up the slopes of its dread volcano, drained its goblet and did not
+      care, emptied it as often as filled and asked for nothing more. A little
+      distance off Herculaneum, with its tender dreams of Greece but with its
+      arms around the breathing image of Italy, slept&mdash;uncovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps, lay
+      unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Cæsar who was to conquer it; and
+      across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of Britain. All over
+      that island one forest; in that forest one worship; in that worship one
+      tree&mdash;the oak of England; and on that oak one bough&mdash;the
+      mistletoe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had in the
+      early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it was the
+      tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah. In Greece it was the tree of
+      Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italy it was the
+      tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of mankind. After the gods
+      passed, it became the tree of the imperial Cæsars. After the Cæsars had
+      passed, it was the oak that Michael Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered
+      over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel near the creation of man and his
+      expulsion from Paradise&mdash;there as always the chosen tree of human
+      desire. In Britain it was the sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch
+      Druid and his fellow-priests performed none of their rites without using
+      its leaves and branches: never anywhere in the world was the oak
+      worshipped with such ceremonies and sacrifices as there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine then a scene&mdash;the chief Nature Festival of that forest
+      worship: the New Year&rsquo;s day of the Druids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their way
+      to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been found with
+      mistletoe growing on it&mdash;growing there so seldom. As the excited
+      throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of reverence and
+      delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is spread. In the midst of
+      the assemblage one figure towers&mdash;the Arch Druid. Every eye is fixed
+      fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own eye may fall with wrath, he
+      may be doomed to become one of the victims annually sacrificed to the oak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is
+      clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough, and
+      making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden pruning
+      hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is blessed and
+      scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each one so
+      receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of which it is
+      Nature&rsquo;s emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have never hitherto
+      been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are slaughtered in
+      sacrifice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to
+      itself, and the New Year&rsquo;s ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the oak
+      is at an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he ended the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows
+      knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in
+      bewilderment:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why did you call that a dark story?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Where is the
+      cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will never
+      throw a dark image on my mind: New Year&rsquo;s day&mdash;the winter woods&mdash;the
+      journeying throng&mdash;the oak&mdash;the bough&mdash;the banquet beneath&mdash;the
+      white bulls with fillets on their horns&mdash;the white-robed priest&mdash;the
+      golden sickle in his hand&mdash;the stroke that severs the mistletoe&mdash;the
+      prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will be blessed in
+      life&rsquo;s sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like to paint that
+      scene. In the centre should be some young girl, pressing to her heart what
+      she believed to be heaven&rsquo;s covenant with her under the guise of a
+      blossom. How could you have wished to withhold such a story from me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled at her a little sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not yet told you all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I have told you enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under her
+      breath one word escaped:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the breath of a discovery&mdash;a discovery of something unknown to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sparing you, Josephine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the wood in
+      her clutch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sparing me?&rdquo; she asked in a tone of torture. &ldquo;Or are you sparing
+      yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed grasp
+      to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly picked it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to tell you the story,&rdquo; he said with a new quietness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was aroused by some change in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have to listen,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is better for you to know. Better
+      for any human being to know any truth than suffer the bane of wrong
+      thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be impossible for you to
+      misjudge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I do
+      not understand you are judging yourself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stepped back a pace&mdash;farther away from her&mdash;and he drew
+      himself up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the
+      right not to be pried into&mdash;not even by the nearest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer to
+      the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being thus
+      pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his shoulders.
+      The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand of the tree. The
+      fir, standing there decked out in the artificial tawdriness of a
+      double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on him&mdash;as sincere
+      as the touch of dying human fingers&mdash;and let its passing youth flow
+      into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned his head toward it as
+      with recognition. Other boughs near the floor likewise thrust themselves
+      forward, hiding his feet so that he stood ankle-deep in forestry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of it a
+      sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old forest
+      claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest tether. As he
+      had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the earlier right to
+      him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the first
+      sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen, Josephine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She buried her face in her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot! I will not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my
+      other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our
+      people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first meaning. In
+      our age of the world we come upon many playful forest survivals of what
+      were once grave things. Often in our play and pastimes and lingering
+      superstitions about the forest we cross faint traces of what were once
+      vital realities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Among these there has always been one that until recently I have never
+      understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of everywhere, is the
+      saying that if a girl is caught standing under the mistletoe, she may be
+      kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have always thought that this
+      ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to some ancient rite&mdash;I could
+      not discover what. Now I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is another scene in the forest of Britain. This time it is not the
+      first day of the year&mdash;the New Year&rsquo;s day of the Druids when they
+      celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer,
+      perhaps the middle of May&mdash;May in England&mdash;with the young beauty
+      of the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. The new moon is just
+      silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the trees.
+      The hawthorn is in bloom&mdash;red and white&mdash;and not far from the
+      spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing,
+      singing, singing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of the
+      woods&mdash;a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its youth
+      and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the all-day
+      sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild violet beds. Its
+      huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though reaching for some
+      object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as its badge of divine
+      authority, worn there as a knight might wear the colors of his Sovereign,
+      grows the mistletoe. There he stands&mdash;the Forest Lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the moon&rsquo;s
+      rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more
+      passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the scene
+      a young girl enters&mdash;her hair hanging down&mdash;her limbs most
+      lightly clad&mdash;the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her
+      skin&mdash;in her eyes love&rsquo;s great need and mystery. Step by step she
+      comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside
+      thing may stay her strength. She draws nearer to the oak, searching amid
+      its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet more dreads
+      not to find: the emblem of a woman&rsquo;s fruitfulness which the young oak&mdash;the
+      Forest Lover&mdash;reaches down toward her. Finding it, beneath it with
+      one deep breath of surrender she takes her place&mdash;the virgin&rsquo;s tryst
+      with the tree&mdash;there to be tested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience&mdash;submission to
+      that test&mdash;or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has
+      rejected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man enters&mdash;a
+      tried and seasoned man&mdash;a human oak&mdash;counterpart of the Forest
+      Lover&mdash;to officiate at the test.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence of
+      his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of
+      ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>He</i> was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was <i>his</i> feet
+      that started toward the oak; <i>his</i> eye that searched for the figure
+      half fainting under the bough; for <i>him</i> the bed of moss and violets&mdash;the
+      hair falling over the eyes&mdash;the loosened girdle&mdash;the breasts of
+      hawthorn white and pink&mdash;the listening song of the nightingale&mdash;the
+      silence of the summer woods&mdash;the seclusion&mdash;the full surrender
+      of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape the penalty
+      of their own death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his own
+      story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The light that
+      she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them&mdash;the old,
+      unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense
+      nostrils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years before
+      and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his lips&mdash;tossed
+      there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the room fell his
+      words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Bride of the Mistletoe!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The storm that had broken over him died away. He shut his eyes on the
+      vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or he
+      may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine,&rdquo; he said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was sitting there before him&mdash;the mother of his children, of the
+      sleeping ones, of the buried ones&mdash;the butterfly broken on the wheel
+      of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat there with the whiteness of death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white candles
+      of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the room concealed
+      its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar from the faithful
+      tree beside the house wall had need now of its bitter rosary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit&mdash;the
+      debt of courtesy and gratitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a wonderful story, Frederick,&rdquo; she said in a manner which showed
+      him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path into
+      the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back what no
+      one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that I never
+      dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your having done
+      this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too much for me
+      to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try to understand
+      it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by waiting. But now
+      there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to speak to you about
+      that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some questions about the last part
+      of the story. I have been wanting to ask you a long time: the story gives
+      me the chance and&mdash;the right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will answer them,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If they can be answered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers passed to
+      and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn out of the
+      deeps of life and sinking back into them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frederick,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;for many years we have been happy together, so
+      happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us except the
+      loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our years,
+      lifted above life&rsquo;s storms. But of course I have realized that sooner or
+      later our lot must become the common one: if we did not go down to Sorrow,
+      Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the heights it dwells best.
+      That is why I wish to say to you to-night what I shall: I think fate&rsquo;s
+      hour has struck for me; I am ready to hear it. Its arrow has already left
+      the bow and is on its way; I open my heart to receive it. This is as I
+      have always wished; I have said that if life had any greatest tragedy, for
+      me, I hoped it would come when I was happiest; thus I should confront it
+      all. I have never drunk half of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let
+      the other half waste; I must go equally to the depth of any suffering.
+      Worse than the suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked
+      some of it, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown
+      myself a cowardly soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a pause she went over this subject as though she were not satisfied
+      that she had made it clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief that comes
+      to us in life when life is at its best&mdash;when no one is to blame&mdash;when
+      no one has committed a fault&mdash;when suffering is meted out to us as
+      the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. In earlier
+      years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all of the world&rsquo;s
+      poets felt the things that pass, even then I was wondering at the way in
+      which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow it must be separated
+      from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkening the bright disk of
+      life&rsquo;s clear tragedy, thus rendering it less bravely seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor play with
+      mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks of
+      Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf&rsquo;s bane and twist the poison
+      out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock; nor bind
+      about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count over the berries
+      of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of the beetle ticking
+      in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death moth, nor listen to the
+      elegy of the owl&mdash;the voice of ruins. Not these! they are the emblems
+      of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow are beautiful things at their
+      perfect moment; a red peony just opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on
+      the white foam, youth not yet faded but already fading, joy with its
+      finger on his lips, bidding adieu.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life&rsquo;s tragedy. And
+      to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: <i>I want to be told</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you can be told, you shall be told,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and composure.
+      Then she began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college friend.
+      You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and celebrated the
+      German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to have the Christmas
+      Tree in our house&mdash;through memory of him and of those years. You have
+      often described to me how you and he in summer went Alpine climbing, and
+      far up in some green valley girdled with glaciers lay of afternoons under
+      some fir tree, reading and drowsing in the crystalline air. You told me of
+      your nights of wandering down the Rhine together when the heart turns so
+      intimately to the heart beside it. He was German youth and song and dream
+      and happiness to you. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer
+      over the crevasse, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you
+      that began to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at the
+      friendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered out of the ideals of his youth:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The longer I knew him, the more I loved him. I never tired of being with
+      him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When he was lost,
+      the whole world lost some of its strength and nobility. After all the
+      years, if he could come back, he would find me unchanged&mdash;that friend
+      of my youth!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The doctor, Herbert and Elsie&rsquo;s father, our nearest neighbor, your
+      closest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor; he
+      is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talking with one
+      another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor and wish him
+      away? Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keep secret from me?
+      Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend of your middle life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. I never
+      tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have no disguises with
+      him and need none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them? Do
+      they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference? Have Harold
+      and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you? Do you ever
+      unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The older they grow, the more I love them. The more they interest me and
+      tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with them and I
+      live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does it develop
+      in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you the regret to be
+      something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad to toil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down the
+      stag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs for fortune, as
+      the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the cross, I follow my
+      work, I follow my work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the world
+      still morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you begin to
+      tire and to think of rest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to his work.
+      Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and why it exists
+      at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what it hates; why
+      it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless when it should be
+      true; how civilized man can fight single handed against the ages that were
+      his lower past&mdash;how he can develop self-renunciation out of
+      selfishness and his own wisdom out of surrounding folly,&mdash;all these
+      are questions that mean more and more. My work is but beginning and the
+      world is morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would you rather
+      move into a new one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take its place.
+      Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care more for it now
+      that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were a ruin, I should
+      love it best!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think more of them and take better care of them now that their hunting
+      days are over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The friend of your youth&mdash;the friend of your middle age&mdash;the
+      children&mdash;your profession&mdash;the world of human life&mdash;this
+      house&mdash;the dogs of the house&mdash;you care more for them all as time
+      passes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I care more for them all as time passes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there came a great stillness in the room&mdash;the stillness of all
+      listening years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I the only thing that you care less for as time passes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I in the way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you like to go over it all again with another?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against the end
+      of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape being
+      touched by him&mdash;to escape the blow of his words. No words came. There
+      was no touch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, looking down at
+      her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck. He must be
+      kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with a kind of
+      incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At first she could
+      so little believe it, that with her face still buried in one hand she
+      searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touch him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she cried out to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t there anything you can say to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence lasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the stillness she began to hear something&mdash;the sound of his
+      footsteps moving on the carpet. She sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was getting darker; he was putting out the candles. It was too
+      dark already to see his face. With fascination she began to watch his
+      hand. How steady it was as it moved among the boughs, extinguishing the
+      lights. Out they went one by one and back into their darkness returned the
+      emblems of darker ages&mdash;the Forest Memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A solitary taper was left burning at the pinnacle of the Tree under the
+      cross: that highest torch of love shining on everything that had
+      disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He quietly put it out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly to have travelled through
+      the open parlor door into the adjoining room, her bedroom; for out of that
+      there now streamed a suffused red light; it came from the lamp near the
+      great bed in the shadowy corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance of a
+      bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with the weight
+      of its own splendor falls face downward on the grass. And in that room
+      this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winter draperies. He
+      had been living alone as a bachelor before he married her. After they
+      became engaged he, having watched for some favorite color of hers, had had
+      this room redecorated in that shade. Every winter since she had renewed in
+      this way or that way these hangings, and now the bridal draperies remained
+      unchanged&mdash;after the changing years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He replaced the taper against the wall and came over and stood before her,
+      holding out his hands to help her rise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She arose without his aid and passed around him, moving toward her
+      bedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, he
+      followed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom and crossed
+      to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping her face
+      bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closed the door on
+      him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with which the soul tears
+      out of itself something that has been its life, she made a circlet of her
+      white arms against the door and laid her profile within this circlet and
+      stood&mdash;the figure of Memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tomb
+      where some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a far land,&mdash;walking
+      some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all human stories end; an
+      autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of its mortality and his heart
+      singing with the bird of one lost to him&mdash;lost to him in his own
+      country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other side of the door the silence was that of a tomb. She had felt
+      confident&mdash;so far as she had expected anything&mdash;that he would
+      speak to her through the door, try to open it, plead with her to open it.
+      Nothing of the kind occurred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why did he not come back? What bolt could have separated her from him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence began to weigh upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in the tense stillness she heard him moving quietly about, getting
+      ready for bed. There were the same movements, familiar to her for years.
+      She would not open the door, she could not leave it, she could not stand,
+      no support was near, and she sank to the floor and sat there, leaning her
+      brow against the lintel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other side the quiet preparations went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back of a
+      chair. The buttons made a little scraping sound against the wood. Then he
+      went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and he opened a
+      drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking of a chair under
+      him as he threw one foot and then the other up across his knee and took
+      off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her the soft movements of his
+      bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony the old impulse started in her
+      to caution him about his slippers). Then followed the brushing of his
+      teeth and the deliberate bathing of his hands. Then was audible the puff
+      of breath with which he blew out his lamp after he had turned it low; and
+      then,&mdash;on the other side of the door,&mdash;just above her ear his
+      knock sounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same knock waited for and responded to throughout the years; so often
+      with his little variations of playfulness. Many a time in early summer
+      when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing some bird
+      sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood&mdash;that tap of
+      heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though her
+      flesh were but will and spirit. When he knocked again, she was across the
+      room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her palms pressed together and
+      thrust between her knees: the instinctive act of a human animal suddenly
+      chilled to the bone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knocking sounded again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there anything you needed?&rdquo; she asked fearfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no response but another knock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure that it would reach him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there anything you wanted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greater alarm,
+      and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated her one question:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you forget anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mind refused to release itself from the iteration of that idea: it was
+      some <i>thing</i>&mdash;not herself&mdash;that he wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, now made of his knock some
+      signal of distress. It took on the authority of an appeal not to be
+      denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a little way, and once more
+      she asked her one poor question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His answer to it came in the form of a gentle pressure against the door,
+      breaking down her resistance. As she applied more strength, this was as
+      gently overcome; and when the opening was sufficient, he walked past her
+      into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How hushed the house! How still the world outside as the cloud wove in
+      darkness its mantle of light!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI. THE WHITE DAWN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Day was breaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crimson curtains of the bedroom were drawn close, but from behind
+      their outer edges faint flanges of light began to advance along the wall.
+      It was a clear light reflected from snow which had sifted in against the
+      window-panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged the yard fence,
+      peaked the little gate-posts, and buried the shrubbery. There was no need
+      to look out in order to know that it had stopped snowing, that the air was
+      windless, and that the stars were flashing silver-pale except one&mdash;great
+      golden-croziered shepherd of the thick, soft-footed, moving host.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Christmas morning on the effulgent Shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already there was sufficient light in the room to reveal&mdash;less as
+      actual things than as brown shadows of the memory&mdash;a gay company of
+      socks and stockings hanging from the mantelpiece; sufficient to give
+      outline to the bulk of a man asleep on the edge of the bed; and it exposed
+      to view in a corner of the room farthest from the rays a woman sitting in
+      a straight-backed chair, a shawl thrown about her shoulders over her
+      night-dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He always slept till he was awakened; the children, having stayed up past
+      their usual bedtime, would sleep late also; she had the white dawn to
+      herself in quietness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She needed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sleep could not have come to her had she wished. She had not slept and she
+      had not lain down, and the sole endeavor during those shattered hours had
+      been to prepare herself for his awakening. She was not yet ready&mdash;she
+      felt that during the rest of her life she should never be quite ready to
+      meet him again. Scant time remained now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment and outdoor noises would begin.
+      Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of its size, rose
+      by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town was proud of its
+      smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields; whereever any
+      hamlet marked the point at which two country roads this morning made the
+      sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudly castled on woody
+      hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder from amid their olive-dark
+      winter pastures; or far away on the shaggy uplift of the Shield wherever
+      any cabin clung like a swallow&rsquo;s nest against the gray Appalachian wall&mdash;everywhere
+      soon would begin the healthy outbreak of joy among men and women and
+      children&mdash;glad about themselves, glad in one another, glad of human
+      life in a happy world. The many-voiced roar and din of this warm carnival
+      lay not far away from her across the cold bar of silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon within the house likewise the rush of the children&rsquo;s feet would
+      startle her ear; they would be tugging at the door, tugging at her heart.
+      And as she thought of this, the recollection of old simple things came
+      pealing back to her from behind life&rsquo;s hills. The years parted like naked
+      frozen reeds, and she, sorely stricken in her womanhood, fled backward
+      till she herself was a child again&mdash;safe in her father&rsquo;s and mother&rsquo;s
+      protection. It was Christmas morning, and she in bare feet was tipping
+      over the cold floors toward their bedroom&mdash;toward her stockings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father and mother! How she needed them at this moment: they had been
+      sweethearts all their lives. One picture of them rose with distinctness
+      before her&mdash;for the wounding picture always comes to the wounded
+      moment. She saw them sitting in their pew far down toward the chancel.
+      Through a stained glass window (where there was a ladder of angels) the
+      light fell softly on them&mdash;both silver-haired; and as with the voices
+      of children they were singing out of one book. She remembered how as she
+      sat between them she had observed her father slip his hand into her
+      mother&rsquo;s lap and clasp hers with a steadfastness that wedded her for
+      eternity; and thus over their linked hands, with the love of their youth
+      within them and the snows of the years upon them, they sang together:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Gently, Lord, O gently lead us
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+  &ldquo;Through the changes Thou&rsquo;st decreed us.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Her father and mother had not been led gently. They had known more than
+      common share of life&rsquo;s shocks and violence, its wrongs and meannesses and
+      ills and griefs. But their faith had never wavered that they were being
+      led gently; so long as they were led together, to them it was gentle
+      leading: the richer each in each for aught whereby nature or man could
+      leave them poorer; the calmer for the shocks; the sweeter for the sour;
+      the finer with one another because of life&rsquo;s rudenesses. In after years
+      she often thought of them as faithful in their dust; and the flowers she
+      planted over them and watered many a bright day with happy tears brought
+      up to her in another form the freshness of their unwearied union.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was what she had not doubted her own life would be&mdash;with him&mdash;when
+      she had married him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the moment of the night before when he had forced the door open and
+      entered her room, they had not exchanged any words nor a glance. He had
+      lain down and soon fallen asleep; apparently he had offered that to her as
+      for the moment at least his solution of the matter&mdash;that he should
+      leave her to herself and absent himself in slumber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instant she knew him to be asleep she set about her preparations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before he awoke she must be gone&mdash;out of the house&mdash;anywhere&mdash;to
+      save herself from living any longer with him. His indifference in the
+      presence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touch and
+      glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life&rsquo;s
+      valleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing the
+      whole truth, know it she should: all this left her wounded and stunned as
+      by an incredible blow, and she was acting first from the instinct of
+      removing herself beyond the reach of further humiliation and brutality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instinctively she took off her wedding ring and laid it on his dresser
+      beside his watch: he would find it there in the morning and he could
+      dispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the plainest heavy one and
+      put on heavy walking shoes. She packed into a handbag a few necessary
+      things with some heirlooms of her own. Among the latter was a case of
+      family jewels; and as she opened it, her eyes fell upon her mother&rsquo;s thin
+      wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped that on and kissed it
+      bitterly. She lifted out also her mother&rsquo;s locket containing a miniature
+      daguerreotype of her father and dutifully fed her eyes on that. Her father
+      was not silver-haired then, but raven-locked; with eyes that men feared at
+      times but no woman ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbed her
+      exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she, coarsely
+      wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, opened her front
+      door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, and passed out&mdash;wading
+      away. Those eyes of his saw what took place the next day: the happiness of
+      Christmas morning turned into horror; the children wild with distress and
+      crying&mdash;the servants dumb&mdash;the inquiry at neighbors&rsquo; houses&mdash;the
+      news spreading to the town&mdash;the papers&mdash;the black ruin. And from
+      him two restraining words issued for her ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My daughter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answered him.
+      And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her blood took fire
+      and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. She stopped her
+      preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its place
+      with exaggerated pains. Having done this, she stood in the middle of the
+      floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to that power of low
+      suggestion which is one of anger&rsquo;s weapons, she began to devise malice.
+      She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took from a bottom drawer&mdash;where
+      long ago it had been stored away under everything else&mdash;a shawl that
+      had been her grandmother&rsquo;s; a brindled crewel shawl,&mdash;sometimes worn
+      by superannuated women of a former generation; a garment of hideousness.
+      Once, when a little girl, she had loyally jerked it off her grandmother
+      because it added to her ugliness and decrepitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around her
+      shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting it off,
+      gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She turned the lamp
+      up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge lidless eye of it
+      would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew a rocking chair to the
+      foot of the bed and seating herself put her forefinger up to each temple
+      and drew out from their hiding places under the mass of her black hair two
+      long gray locks and let these hang down haglike across her bosom. She
+      banished the carefully nourished look of youth from her face&mdash;dropped
+      the will to look young&mdash;and allowed the forced-back years to rush
+      into it&mdash;into the wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature,
+      assisting each other so ably, had wrought in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of the
+      lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in exultation
+      of vengeance that she was to live on there in his house&mdash;<i>his</i>
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while a darker mood came over her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the room.
+      She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it would be
+      screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber was heaviest,
+      into that shadow she retired and in it she sat&mdash;with furtive look to
+      see whether he observed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was
+      Anglo-Saxon blood of the world&rsquo;s fiercest; floating in the tide of it
+      passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in
+      tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but fiercest
+      ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A thousand years
+      from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting beside some sleeping
+      father of hers in their forest-beleaguered castle&mdash;the moonlight
+      streaming in upon him through the javelined casement and putting before
+      her the manly beauty of him&mdash;the blond hair matted thick on his
+      forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth reddening in his slumber
+      under its curling gold&mdash;some mother of hers whom he had carried off
+      from other men by might of his sword, thus sitting beside him and knowing
+      him to be colder to her now than the moon&rsquo;s dead rays, might have watched
+      those rays as they travelled away from his figure and put a gleam on his
+      sword hanging near: a thousand years ago: some mother of hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers so
+      often to take its place. The best and the worst&mdash;these are the sole
+      alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making: hence life&rsquo;s
+      spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever present about us.
+      Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the best as their first
+      choice, fight their way through defeat to the standard of the second best
+      and fight on there. And whatever one may think of the legend otherwise,
+      abundant experience justifies the story that it was the Archangel who fell
+      to the pit. The low never fall far: how can they? They already dwell on
+      the bottom of things, and many a time they are to be seen there with
+      vanity that they should inhabit such a privileged highland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the tragic
+      duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a height of moral
+      splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to the lowest she
+      harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or as the stirred
+      sediment of her own imperfections. And as is unfortunately true, this
+      descent into moral darkness possessed the grateful illusion that it was an
+      ascent into new light. All evil prompting became good suggestion; every
+      injustice made its claim to be justification. She enjoyed the elation of
+      feeling that she was dragging herself out of life&rsquo;s quicksands upward to
+      some rock, where there might be loneliness for her, but where there would
+      be cleanness. The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred;
+      and hatred is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it
+      needs not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its
+      faithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled most poignantly in
+      this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact that the cloven
+      hoof should have been found on noble mountain tops&mdash;that he should
+      have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling near regions of
+      sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable to her was that which
+      dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now his whole story of the
+      Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words about the growth of the
+      world&rsquo;s spirit&mdash;about the sacrifice of the lower in ourselves to the
+      higher&mdash;this cant now became to her the invocation and homage of the
+      practised impostor: he had indeed carried the Christmas Tree on his
+      shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of Immortal Purity for mankind
+      but the manger of his own bestiality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with
+      spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when he
+      had let her know that he wanted to be free&mdash;at that moment she might
+      tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his unworthiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the devil
+      in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon companions.
+      And at one period of the night she began to look back upon her experience
+      with a curious sense of prior familiarity&mdash;to see it as a story
+      already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the first stage of
+      one of those tragedies that later find their way into the care of family
+      physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the confidence of clergymen,
+      into the papers and divorce courts, and that receive their final flaying
+      or canonization on the stage and in novels of the time. Sitting at a
+      distance, she had within recent years studied in a kind of altruistic
+      absorption how the nation&rsquo;s press, the nation&rsquo;s science of medicine, the
+      nation&rsquo;s science of law, the nation&rsquo;s practice of religion, and the
+      nation&rsquo;s imaginative literature were all at work with the same national
+      omen&mdash;the decay of the American family and the downfall of the home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had
+      incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where the
+      older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation rock. The
+      corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited her; and thus
+      to-night she took her place among those women whom the world first hears
+      of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of refuge and in their
+      graves&mdash;and more sadly elsewhere; whose misfortunes interested the
+      press and whose types attracted the novelists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was one of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who
+      unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity&mdash;or
+      walks into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under
+      another name or with another lot lives on&mdash;devoting herself to memory
+      or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to the
+      world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains to her
+      but living apart&mdash;on the other side of the locked door; the woman who
+      stays on without locking the door, half-hating, half-loving&mdash;the
+      accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who welcomes the end of the
+      love-drama as the beginning of peace and the cessation of annoyances; the
+      woman who begins to act her tragedy to servants and children and
+      acquaintances&mdash;reaping sympathy for herself and sowing ruin and
+      torture&mdash;for him; the woman who drops the care of house, ends his
+      comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value as at least an
+      investment toward his general well-being; the woman who endeavors to
+      rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh fascinations; the woman
+      who plays upon jealousy and touches the male instinct to keep one&rsquo;s own
+      though little prized lest another acquire it and prize it more; the woman
+      who sets a watch to discover the other woman: they swarmed about her, she
+      identified each.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their
+      companionship; a strange dread moved her lest <i>they</i> should discover
+      <i>her</i>. One only she detached from the throng and for a while withdrew
+      with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who when so rejected
+      turns to another man&mdash;the man who is waiting somewhere near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man <i>she</i> turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the
+      country doctor, her husband&rsquo;s tried and closest friend, whose children
+      were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years <i>her</i>
+      secret had been&mdash;the doctor. When she had come as a bride into that
+      neighborhood, he, her husband&rsquo;s senior by several years, was already well
+      established in his practice. He had attended her at the birth of her first
+      child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had discovered that he loved
+      her; she could never have him again. This had dealt his professional
+      reputation a wound, but he understood, and he welcomed the wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from the
+      turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep alongside her,
+      she could hear the doctor&rsquo;s buggy passing on its way to some patient, or
+      on its return from the town where he had patients also. Many a time she
+      had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of his life there turned in
+      to her. There were nights of pitch darkness and beating rain; and
+      sometimes on these she had to know that he was out there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where her
+      husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the doctor. He would
+      be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and enveloped it. She
+      groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old lost human paths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The endless night scarcely moved on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was wearied out, she was exhausted. There is anger of such intensity
+      that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations that are its fuel;
+      nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame, and being unfed,
+      it dies out. Moreover, it is the destiny of a portion of mankind that they
+      are enjoined by their very nobility from winning low battles; these always
+      go against them: the only victories for them are won when they are leading
+      the higher forces of human nature in life&rsquo;s upward conflicts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neither
+      moral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundless
+      plain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm; and
+      slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like the
+      radiance of the storm-winged sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures appeared&mdash;her
+      children. Hitherto the energies of her mind had grappled with the problem
+      of her future; now memories began&mdash;memories that decide more perhaps
+      than anything else for us. And memories began with her children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it with
+      the palm of her hand, started upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear
+      stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the broad
+      stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit she started
+      to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew back. This room
+      had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the Years. She shrank from it as
+      one who has been arraigned may shrink from a tribunal where sentence has
+      been pronounced which changes the rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits,
+      its toys, its ribbons, but deepened the derision and the bitterness. And
+      the evergreen there in the middle of the room&mdash;it became to her as
+      that tree of the knowledge of good and evil which at Creation&rsquo;s morning
+      had driven Woman from Paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house, but
+      paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he should awake
+      in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was? Would he call out
+      to her&mdash;with what voice? Would he come to seek her&mdash;with what
+      emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now&mdash;the drift back to
+      the old mooring.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear of
+      remembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to the
+      last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seek her. It
+      had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room to room for the
+      delight of proving how persistently he would prolong his search. But one
+      day some two years before this, when she had entered his study about the
+      usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for his writing desk, she saw
+      him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on, making some notes. The sight
+      had struck the flowers from her hands; she swiftly gathered them up, and
+      going to her room, shut herself in; she knew it was the beginning of the
+      end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre of the
+      bedchamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he had done or
+      failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself. Everything else
+      had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; the old touch abandoning
+      the hands; less time for her in the house, more for work; constraint
+      beginning between them, the awkwardness of reserve; she seeing Nature&rsquo;s
+      movement yet refusing to believe it; then at last resolving to know to the
+      uttermost and choosing her bridal night as the hour of the ordeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he awoke, would he come to seek her&mdash;with what feelings?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her right hand
+      and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There was a turn in
+      the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle rays fell on the
+      face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on a step, putting the
+      candle beside her; and there she remained, her elbows on her knees, her
+      face resting on her palms; and into the abyss of the night dropped the
+      tranquil strokes. More memories!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding
+      lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness
+      overflowing its dumb environs&mdash;humanizing these&mdash;drawing them
+      toward her by a gracious responsive symbolism&mdash;extending speech over
+      realms which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have
+      struck into speechlessness long æons past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden God of Hours; she had
+      often feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of it she
+      would pin inside the walls little clusters of blossoms as votive
+      offerings: if it would only move faster and bring him home! The usual hour
+      of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She had symbolized
+      that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for the children&mdash;the
+      three in one&mdash;the trinity of the household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him, up
+      to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: all is
+      well!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first sound that had reached her from any source during this
+      agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outside humanity;
+      from Time itself which brings us together and holds us together as long as
+      possible and then separates us and goes on its way&mdash;indifferent
+      whether we are together or apart; Time which welds the sands into the rock
+      and then wears the rock away to its separate sands and sends the level
+      tide softly over them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once for him, once for her, once for the children! She took up the candle
+      and went upstairs to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two little
+      girls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and in another
+      room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turned on one
+      another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fist outside the
+      cover. In a few years how differently the four would be divided and
+      paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife; and out of the
+      lives of the two of them who were hers she would then drop into some
+      second place. If to-night she were realizing what befalls a wife when she
+      becomes the Incident to her husband, she would then realize what befalls a
+      woman when the mother becomes the Incident to her children: Woman, twice
+      the Incident in Nature&rsquo;s impartial economy! Her son would playfully
+      confide it to his bride that she must bear with his mother&rsquo;s whims and
+      ways. Her daughter would caution her husband that he must overlook
+      peculiarities and weaknesses. The very study of perfection which she
+      herself had kindled and fanned in them as the illumination of their lives
+      they would now turn upon her as a searchlight of her failings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of his
+      discussing her with any human being. Even though he should some day desert
+      her, he would never discuss her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with her against
+      the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strength from her
+      to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow. But now she began to ask
+      herself whether his protection <i>had</i> failed her. Could he have
+      recognized the situation without rendering it worse? Had he put his arms
+      around her, might she not have&mdash;struck at him? Had he laid a
+      finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not have left a scar for life?
+      Any words of his, would they not have rung in her ears unceasingly? To
+      pass it over was as though it had never been&mdash;was not <i>that</i> his
+      protection?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed her
+      child in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor&rsquo;s children&mdash;with
+      memory of their mother; and then she descended by the rear stairway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she had placed
+      the lamp&mdash;near the manuscript&mdash;and she sat down and looked at
+      that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had made her the gift of his work&mdash;dedicated to her the triumphs
+      of his toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his widening
+      career and enter with him into the world&rsquo;s service. She crossed her hands
+      over it awhile, and then she left it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the
+      immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.
+      After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the
+      echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music only,&mdash;the
+      rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She sat there now
+      quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear began faintly to
+      beat the sad sublime tones of his story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watch the
+      youth of the hemp&mdash;a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If
+      the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulse
+      swayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads were
+      instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and east wind
+      sent it west.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we sometimes
+      call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It is run through by
+      many different laws; governed by many distinct forces, each of which
+      strives to control it wholly&mdash;but never does. Selfishness blows on it
+      like a parching sirocco, and all things seem to bow to the might of
+      selfishness. Generosity moves across the expanse, and all things are seen
+      responsive to what is generous. Place yourself where life is lowest and
+      everything like an avalanche is rushing to the bottom. Place yourself
+      where character is highest, and lo! the whole world is but one struggle
+      upward to what is high. You see what you care to see, and find what you
+      wish to find.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his story of the Forest and the Heart he had wanted to trace but one
+      law, and he had traced it; he had drawn all things together and bent them
+      before its majesty: the ancient law of Sacrifice. Of old the high
+      sacrificed to the low; afterwards the low to the high: once the sacrifice
+      of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but always in ourselves of the
+      lower to the higher in order that, dying, we may live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With this law he had made his story a story of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldæa; the candle bore it to
+      ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the
+      dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it to
+      Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and Rome; the
+      doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe to Britain,&mdash;and
+      all brought it to Christ,&mdash;Christ the latest world-ideal of sacrifice
+      that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of all for all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story was for herself, he had said, and for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Himself! Here at last all her pain and wandering of this night ended: at
+      the bottom of her wound where rankled <i>his problem</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this problem she had most shrunk and into this she now entered: She
+      sacrificed herself in him! She laid upon herself his temptation and his
+      struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking her candle, she passed back into her bedroom and screened it where
+      she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her wedding ring on again with blanched lips. She went to his
+      bedside, and drawing to the pillow the chair on which his clothes were
+      piled, sat down and laid her face over on it; and there in that shrine of
+      feeling where speech is formed, but whence it never issues, she made her
+      last communion with him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>&ldquo;You, to whom I gave my youth and all that youth could mean to me;
+      whose children I have borne and nurtured at my breast&mdash;all of whose
+      eyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of whom I have closed; husband
+      of my girlhood, loved as no woman ever loved the man who took her home;
+      strength and laughter of his house; helper of what is best in me; my
+      defender against things in myself that I cannot govern; pathfinder of my
+      future; rock of the ebbing years! Though my hair turn white as driven snow
+      and flesh wither to the bone, I shall never cease to be the flame that you
+      yourself have kindled. </i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where there must
+      be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heard our
+      whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences&mdash;the
+      Long Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clung to!&mdash;Adieu!&mdash;Adieu!&mdash;Adieu!&mdash;Adieu!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would not
+      lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his pillow the
+      last drop of things that must go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She there&mdash;her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life&rsquo;s
+      Calvary of the Snows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, and there it
+      brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near when she must awaken
+      him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over before the children rushed
+      downstairs or the servants knocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the gray
+      told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly away from
+      brow and temples so that the contour of her head&mdash;one of nature&rsquo;s
+      noblest&mdash;was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the women of her
+      land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of their baptism into a
+      new life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders rising out
+      of this had the austerity of marble&mdash;exempt not from ruin, but exempt
+      from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once and made a little
+      instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide them under the
+      sleeves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and
+      quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it. Then
+      she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes&mdash;the look of
+      the rejected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed,
+      resting on one elbow and looking down at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For years her first words to him on this day had been the world&rsquo;s best
+      greeting:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Merry Christmas!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and instantly
+      looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out of it all,
+      what their life was to be henceforth, what their future would be worth.
+      But at the sight of her so changed&mdash;something so gone out of her
+      forever&mdash;with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She struggled
+      to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly about the
+      youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his face. She caught at
+      one of the braids of her hair and threw it across her eyes, and then
+      silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her. The torrent of her
+      tears raining down into his tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tears not for Life&rsquo;s faults but for Life when there are no faults. They
+      locked in each other&rsquo;s arms&mdash;trying to save each other on Nature&rsquo;s
+      vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rush of children&rsquo;s feet was heard in the hall and there was smothered
+      laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Christmas Morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward over the
+      gladness of the Shield. The farmhouse&mdash;such as the poet had sung of
+      when he could not help singing of American home life&mdash;looked out from
+      under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller who laughs
+      at the snow on his hat and shoulders. Smoke poured out of its chimneys,
+      bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak tree beside it stood
+      quieted of its moaning and tossing. Soon after sunrise a soul of passion
+      on scarlet wings, rising out of the snow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a
+      topmost twig of the oak; and sitting there with its breast to the gorgeous
+      sun scanned for a little while that landscape of ice. It was beyond its
+      intelligence to understand how nature could create it for Summer and then
+      take Summer away. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a
+      sun so true could shine on a world so false.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovelling paths.
+      After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with fireside
+      warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat, rushed out of the
+      front door pursued by a little soldier sternly booted and capped and
+      gloved; and the two snowballed each other, going at it furiously. Watching
+      them through a window a little girl, dancing a dreamy measure of her own,
+      ever turned inward and beckoned to some one to come and look&mdash;beckoned
+      in vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the little girl
+      played with the doll&mdash;hugged to her breast the symbol of ancient
+      sacrifice, the emblem of the world&rsquo;s new mercy. Along the turnpike
+      sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and the
+      shouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across the
+      shining valleys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from its surroundings;
+      just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low, thick, covered with
+      snow except where a bough had been broken off for decorating the house;
+      here owing to the steepness the snow slid off. The spot looked like a
+      wound in the side of the Divine purity, and across this open wound the
+      tree had hung its rosary-beads never to be told by Sorrow&rsquo;s fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backward across
+      the sadness of the Shield. One by one the stars came back to their
+      faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinging lamp was
+      lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little round mats of snow
+      stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost a low Christmas star
+      was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; and between those beacons
+      soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and children assembling for
+      the party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late into the night the party lasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went to
+      ashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and the
+      robust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of our
+      life. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate and
+      drank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to go
+      faster than the music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on the
+      Christmas Tree&mdash;the handing over to this person and to that person of
+      those unread lessons of the ages&mdash;little mummied packages of the lord
+      of time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced those burnt
+      out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were white now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene!
+      Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house:
+      hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughing and
+      talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to the doctor&rsquo;s
+      wife&mdash;faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be the American
+      wife and mother in the home of the poet&rsquo;s dream: the spiritual majesty of
+      her bridal veil still about her amid life&rsquo;s snow as it never lifts itself
+      from the face of the <i>Jungfrau</i> amid the sad most lovely mountains:
+      the American wife and mother!&mdash;herself the <i>Jungfrau</i> among the
+      world&rsquo;s women!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takes
+      place there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the State
+      which is also a song of the Nation&mdash;its melody of the unfallen home:
+      with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated at the
+      piano&mdash;the others upholding her like a living bulwark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of: those
+      Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the embodied&mdash;the
+      Guests of the Imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambers arm
+      and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that present scene
+      nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree the Wraiths
+      of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naught of those
+      later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to fill their places.
+      Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes that bent undivided
+      attention upon the actual pageant: these were Life&rsquo;s Pities. Ever and anon
+      they would lift their noble veils and look out upon that brief flicker of
+      our mortal joy, and drop them and relapse into their compassionate vigil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filled the
+      entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through the rooms
+      with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckoned her to a
+      place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered back peeped shyly
+      at her but then with some sure instinct of recognition ran to her and
+      threw down their gifts, to put their arms around her. And the Pities
+      before they left the house that night walked past her one by one and each
+      lifted its veil and dropped it more softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the Shape:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet under the chandelier&mdash;which
+      had no decoration whatsoever&mdash;stood an exquisite Spirit of Youth,
+      more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet most alive; her lips
+      scarce parted&mdash;her skin like white hawthorn shadowed by pink&mdash;in
+      her eyes the modesty of withdrawal from Love&mdash;in her heart the
+      surrender to it. During those distracting hours never did she move nor did
+      her look once change: she waiting there&mdash;waiting for some one to come&mdash;waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Waiting.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg&rsquo;s Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen
+
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+</pre>
+
+  </body>
+</html>