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!_”