fields, they enacted Saint Jacob, his toiling, unsuccessful ascent of
Ararat, and the visit from the plank-bearing angel; and in the first
thaw they used the moist, easily packed snow for the construction
of Saint Gregory’s well, the home of the kind widow, and a rather
diminutive palace of the wicked king. In the summer, reënforced by
all the children within a wide radius, they ran screaming through the
open fields, now as hordes of barbarians, devastating the land of
Mary Christmas, now as bloodthirsty Turks, bent on massacre. But the
acknowledged favorite was the story of the journey of Mary Christmas,
sick, in the donkey-cart to Etchmiadzin and of her healing in the
great church. This they played again and again with William Howe’s big
Newfoundland as the donkey, Cynthia and Mary alternately as the sick
child and her anxious mother, Roger as the priest in the church, and
William himself, on account of his necessary provision for the journey,
as the joyous father. When John looked wistful at having no part, they
made him the little brother, who with the mother welcomed his sister’s
glad return home, under the old tamarack tree at the bottom of the
field.
Curiously enough, perhaps, they did not play the penitent pilgrim,
though it would seem that his triumphant journey with Saint Gregory’s
hand beneath his cloak might have afforded the best sort of dramatic
material. Whether it lacked for them a certain concrete vividness
which the other stories held, or whether, actuated by some strange,
instinctive reserve, not unknown to childhood, they forbore to portray
in visible form the many miraculous deeds wrought by the hand of the
saint, one will never know; but the older members of the company never
proposed its performance, and its stirring details were kept alive
among them only by oral tradition.
And yet, although the players, as a whole, never presented the
journeyings of the good bishop, the story was enacted by one of their
number, who, going alone after the manner of the pilgrim himself,
wrought his holy deeds in the silence of the snow-covered woods and
pastures. That one was Cynthia Wescott. Since Mary Christmas had
first told her stories, she had held this one as the tale of tales;
and as the months in their quick succession left her longer and more
awkward in arms and legs and more wondering and wistful in heart, its
loveliness haunted her until it hurt by its very grace and beauty.
Cynthia, it will be readily perceived, was growing up. No blossom-laden
tree had flashed suddenly upon her inward vision,--Fate, perhaps,
had been kinder to her sister,--but certain disturbing questions and
indistinct, reluctant perceptions had gleamed for a moment across
her ready imagination, and then had faded away before she could see
them clearly. They were the growing pains of her mind, though she
did not know that. One day she felt the weight of coming years; the
next the ecstasy of their hidden secrets. Into her life, she would
have said could she have found words to describe it, there had crept
a kind of rhythm, now quick and joyous with melody, now slow and sad
in its cadences. It was all quite unexplainable, and at times most
bewildering. And when on Christmas eve at the concert in the church
she discovered all at once that John, reciting a piece, in a velvet
suit, skillfully fashioned from the discarded parlor lambrequin, was
something to cry over instead of to smile at as the others were doing,
as _she_ had always done before, she understood that the clear,
orderly days of her little girlhood had gone away. Nor could she then
know that they would return to her after many years, clear, orderly,
luminous, their certain rhythms in harmonious accord.
Thus it happened that on a clear February morning, while the others
were coasting down the long hill, Cynthia played the part of the
pilgrim. Clad in red hood and mittens and in her red coat with its long
cape, which so effectually hid the necessary box with its supernatural
powers, she hurried to the stable and through its big, yawning doors
into the snow-covered fields which led almost directly to the woods
and high pastures. The crust of the snow was hard enough to bear her
weight, and she hurried on until she was beyond the reach of the eyes
and ears of those in the immediate neighborhood. Once within the shadow
of the trees, she stood beneath a great pine, almost shamefaced over
her yielding to the desire to come on such an errand. But the stillness
of the woods, broken only by the occasional cry of a bluejay or the
swish of pine boughs in the wind, reassured her in her purpose, and she
began the journey of the pilgrim with his silver box.
As she grew older, she always held among the confused and crowded
impressions of her childhood the clearest memory of that winter day;
of the bright silence of the woods, and of herself going softly
through the trees, across a frozen swamp with the brown marsh grass
protruding above its smooth, white hummocks, over wide stretches of
pasture, and stopping here and there to draw from beneath her red cape
the wonder-working box and to present it before the suffering eyes of
some stricken animal or tired wayfarer. She heard, too, as the years
came and went, the sound of her own childish voice, clear and high in
the still air, reciting the words with which Mary Christmas’ mellowed,
ringing tones had endowed the pilgrim and which she supplemented by
others of her own:--
“‘Art thou ill, my brother? Look upon the hand of the holy Saint
Gregory, which the Lord hath sent unto thee.’”
“‘Death, flee away from this poor creature, in the blessed name of
Saint Gregory and of the Lord of Hosts!’”
It was from that day, she knew, that the love of words came to suffuse
her life with its radiance, tuning her ears to cadences of sound,
charming her eyes with the ecstasy of light and color, delighting her
imagination by opening gates into far fields. Had the lips of countless
thousands in their age-long life endowed them with music? Had the
visions, evoked by them centuries ago, lingered within their syllables?
From that day as the penitent pilgrim in the still, white wood she
became a worshipper at their shrine, repeating to herself again and
again the sentences and phrases which Mary Christmas had first endeared
to her and which had stayed to take up their own places in her heart:--
“‘The Lord be merciful unto thee.’”
“‘In the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of
Hosts.’”
Single words, too, began to hold a charm for her, words
quite free from their context, but never alone because of the pictures
they called forth. _Silent, holy, high, garden, old_--what magic
lay within each one of them!
_Old_ was, perhaps, her first love and kept its place in spite
of many contending rivals. Mary Christmas loved _old_. Upon her
lips it opened the gates of ancient cities, led one over desolate,
hoary plains and hot, sand-swept deserts, carried one to remote gardens
within gray, crumbling walls, brought before one’s eyes a time-worn,
weary land. Cynthia came to cherish those three letters as one
cherishes a rare jewel which in changing lights gives forth changing
colors. In fact, she grew so ardent in her love for them that she felt
personally aggrieved when John at the breakfast table, his father being
absent, cried in a sudden declaration of independence:--
“I hate this nasty old porridge! I won’t eat it!”
VII
A PILLAR OF FIRE
The opening years of the new century found Mary and Cynthia within the
white-columned academy and in daily verbal conflict with Orgetorix,
chief of the Helvetians, Catiline, and the Ten Thousand Greeks
with their interminable parasangs; Roger mightily concerned with
“Thanatopsis” and cube root; and John under the initial spell of the
burial of De Soto in the dark Mississippi. They found Mrs. Wescott
still true to sulphur and molasses, blue serge, and a nine o’clock
bedtime, and Mr. Wescott still a victim during the summer months of
that distressing habit already fully described, and an all-the-year
supporter of the party which had brought forth a Lincoln and inspired
a McKinley--the party whose bedrock principles of conservatism and
integrity must safely weather its present rather drastic and impulsive
leadership. And they found Mary Christmas still a traveler of the coast
roads from the drifting of apple blossoms in early June to the falling
of the leaves in late October.
Nor had those years wrought many changes in Mary Christmas. Except for
some white threads in her dark hair and the deepening of certain lines
about her nose and mouth, she was outwardly as she had been on that
memorable first visit. She still wore the gold coins in her ears and
the red silk handkerchief, shifted her black bundle from one hip to the
other with surprising agility, and persisted in falling upon her face
at the initial approach of Mr. Wescott. She was still an inexhaustible
treasure-house of stories, each year adding others to those first and
best beloved, of the ark and Ararat, of the ancient saints and the
pilgrim, and of that holy city, Etchmiadzin. Her eyes under their dark
brows had not lost their restlessness. Now they burned with anguish
over the sufferings of her land, now glowed with the sad loveliness of
the tales which she told, now gleamed with ominous revenge at the hated
name of Turk, which, although the children were forbidden to use it in
her presence, occasionally found its way to her ears. Falling petals
and the drying of the country roads still were heralds of her coming;
indeed, those early days in June when orchard blossoms drifted through
the bright air had come to be known in the Wescott family and among the
other children of the village as Mary Christmas days.
And yet the opening years of that new century found Mary Christmas
in ways of pleasantness which the late nineties had been reluctant
to promise her. Indeed, she might well have cried with the Psalmist,
perchance of her own hill pastures: “The lines are fallen unto me in
pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.” Slowly but steadily
she had built up a reputation for herself among a people by nature
skeptical of the “foreigner,” and in districts far from Utopian for
peddlers of all sorts. Although she had in no small measure the
shrewdness of her race, all suspicion of dishonesty, rife upon her
early appearance, had been dispelled by an openness in her business
dealings, almost childlike in its simplicity. Attendant upon this was
a ready understanding of the whims and prejudices of her customers, a
happy faculty which forbade the tenacity of the average seller, but was
quick to suggest a substitute for whatever was refused. Aiding these
assets to good business and yet transcending them all was her larger,
more bountiful self, which, once met with on the common way, was never
to be forgotten, and which now, as then, beggars all attempts at
description.
She manifested, even to dull people, an almost overwhelming prodigality
of nature. Her energy was tireless and apparently incapable of
consumption. It carried her over miles of country, sometimes in a
drenching rain, and left her at nightfall at the back door of some
upland farm, whose unwilling inhabitants grudgingly offered her the
hayloft as a bedchamber and in an hour were taking down the newspapers
from the windows of the spare room. It lent a buoyancy to her tired
feet when during her first months as a traveler she had left the main
road for an outlying house, only to be turned away at the gate. It
prompted her in long stretches of woodland to sing the folk songs of
her people--songs of Vartan, who saved Armenia from the worship of
fire, and of the Virgin, on whose festival the ripening grapes are
blessed by a holy cross. It made her never too tired to talk or to play
with children. In its gracious strength she dreamed dreams and saw
visions: dreams of the day when she should bring her children to this
kind, new land; visions of herself, behind a red pushcart with stout,
well-oiled wheels, convenient apartments for small accessories, and a
thick rubber cover, protective against bad weather. Who shall say that
it sprang from a superabundance of physical well-being alone? Surely
such power breathed of the spiritual, and suggested the generosity of
God on the day of her creation.
Thus it happened that after five summers in the country and five
winters in the towns the dream of dreams came true, and Raphael
Christmas and his sister Mary arrived from Erzerum. What excitement
there was in the Wescott family and in the Wescott village, when on
a Mary Christmas day, just five years from the first, this great
announcement was proudly made under the apple trees! Even Mary and
Cynthia, with their braids turned under and college only two years
away, were thrilled to their finger-tips, and John and Roger refused
to let Mary Christmas go on her way until she had promised to bring
Raphael with her the following spring.
But Raphael Christmas, it must be confessed, was a sore disappointment.
When, the news of his mother’s approach having been brought to them by
the doctor in his carriage, they ran to meet her up the hill, and saw
a tall, awkward boy in clothes like their own, they were all conscious
of a sinking feeling within themselves. No imagination, even of the
most leaping and vivid variety, could see in this overgrown lad, who
shifted uneasily from one side of the road to the other, threw stones
at sparrows, and was impolite to his mother, one who had lived in the
Garden of Eden and had looked upon Mount Ararat with its light-touched
shadow of the ark. Not the most friendly feeling in the world could
transform his dark, thin face, with its shrewd black eyes and its
total lack of all those qualities which made his mother’s beautiful,
into the welcome one of a valued, if infrequent, companion.
Swift Americanization, a process at that time relatively unhampered by
theories, had left its marks on Raphael Christmas. A year at school
in Portland had taught him many things. Among the most outstanding
of these were an astounding command of American slang of a range and
versatility known to few natives, the art of chewing gum noisily and
continuously, and the most rampant desire to lose as soon as possible
all traces of his foreign birth. This longing prompted him to an
almost continual nagging of his mother. Her red silk handkerchief, the
gold coins in her ears, and her gold-laced bodice annoyed him. His
playfellows in Portland laughed at them and taunted him. Whenever his
quick eyes saw money pass into her hands from the sale of anything, he
began his questions.
“There’s money, Ma! For a dress, ain’t it--a real dress, and a hat?
Yes?”
“There’s money! You buy a hat now, and take out the coins?”
He had grown quickly to dislike all references to Armenia, and only
tolerated his mother’s fervent hopes that he might some day avenge his
father’s death, because he liked the picture of himself, knife-armed,
and giving blood for blood.
All these things the Wescotts gathered for themselves on that sixth
Mary Christmas day--gathered with a ready sympathy for Mary Christmas
that helped to quell their own disillusionment. Mary and Cynthia,
escaping to their own room after dinner while their father and mother
talked with their guest and while John and Roger introduced Raphael
more or less apologetically to the baseball team, confided to each
other their only remaining hope, that Mary Christmas could not, for the
blinding glory of her dreams, see in Raphael what they saw. What might
happen, they wondered, if she did see in one quick, all-illuminating
flash or in a hundred more slow, more cruel perceptions the
unloveliness in him, so apparent to them all! Then the light that
went before her like a pillar of fire, that made her forgetful of
tired feet, that impelled her to sing songs and to tell stories to
children--might it not vanish into unutterable darkness?
But Fate was kind to Mary Christmas and reassuring to Mary and Cynthia.
Surely no all-illuminating flash revealed Raphael to his mother,
and, if the perceptions came, they were slow and far less cruel than
they might have been. To her, Raphael, in spite of his derision of
their country, his shiftiness, his nagging, and his gum, was heir to
the wealth of ages and, in some mysterious way which would later be
revealed to them, the certain avenger of his father’s cruel death. She
did concede, it is true, to his nagging, and, to the Wescott mind, in a
deplorable measure; for in the spring following his visit she appeared
in a rusty green suit, many sizes too large for her, and in a red,
daisy-trimmed hat, which she wore so insecurely pinned to her dark hair
that it sat upon one ear in a most rakish manner. But the gold coins
she never relinquished.
That year, too, the vision of the pushcart became a reality. It was
red, with the stout, well-oiled wheels of which she had dreamed; it
boasted the protective rubber covering, which on fair days folded
neatly under its shining body; it had compartments of all sizes with
hinged covers, and, for those which carried the most valuable of her
wares, padlocks with tiny keys. Her pride in it and her repeated
assurances that the labor of her journey was now depleted by half
atoned in some degree for the loss of the gold-laced bodice and for the
advent of the red hat.
It was on this visit that they noted the deepening lines around her
nose and mouth, and a perceptible, if slight, dulling of her eyes that
had so burned and glowed through all the years they had known her.
“You’re tired, Mary Christmas,” said Father Wescott. “Stay at home this
winter and let the town trade go.”
And John, drawing his mother into the pantry on the pretext of an
afternoon lunch, confessed, in a burst of anxious confidence, that he,
for one, was worried.
But Mary Christmas laughed at them as she adjusted her new hat, which
immediately became unadjusted when she stooped to lift the handle of
the pushcart. She must work winter and summer, she said; it cost a
lot to keep a family of three in a real house. There was pride in her
voice, however, when she told John, who pushed the cart up the hill for
her, how Raphael was now standing on the street corners and selling
papers in shrill calls like a real American boy, and how deftly and
quickly the fingers of little Mary went in and out of the frames that
held the laces.
VIII
SHOWERS OF GOLD AND PEARLS
Thus it came about in Wescott history that those bright years of
childhood when things were things and those troubled later years when
the same things could not be bounded by their own neat selves became a
kind of tapestry shot through and through with colored threads. Blue,
purple, red, gold, and silver, they deepened and glowed--the colors
of music and poetry, of magical words and ancient tales, of romance
and high endeavor, of distant places and strange peoples, of sacrifice
and holiness. Into the texture of their lives Mary Christmas had woven
those threads in hues that were fadeless against time and circumstance.
Not that the four Wescotts interpreted their love for Mary Christmas
or their debt to her in terms of colored threads in tapestry. That was
to come later. They only knew that for years she had added to their
lives a vividness and a completeness which had not been there before
she came. They knew, too, that she had entwined herself inextricably
within the fabric of their existence because of her connection with
certain occurrences, which, it is quite safe to say, seemed at the time
of their happening of more tremendous import than all the quiet hours
beneath the orchard trees.
They early learned that she was a safe repository for secrets and a
valued counselor in times of storm and stress; and although her visits
were confined to that anticipated one of early June and an occasional
second in October, which they could never entirely depend upon, they
found her more than once the one thing needful. Indeed, Roger and
John, with other of their associates, never forgot her sudden and
unlooked-for appearance and the quick relief it engendered on a certain
Saturday morning of September in Roger’s thirteenth year. They were
gathered in disheartened council on Mary Wescott’s boulder, in a final
and desperate effort to discover some means of averting from themselves
the just deserts of a forbidden line of conduct, which, in this case,
had to do with some pear trees, an angry farmer, stones, and broken
windows. Retribution seemed inevitable. They were silently picturing
the chastened glances which they would exchange at church the next
morning in an attempt to discover whose fate had been most unendurable,
when around a bend in the path at the foot of the boulder came Mary
Christmas, taking her favorite short cut through the pasture. Surely
here was visible proof of a beneficent Providence, who was not deaf to
frenzied prayers, and who caused His rain to fall alike upon the just
and upon the unjust!
It was no easy matter to disclose all the miserable details of the
affair to Mary Christmas, whose piercing black eyes sought out every
jot and tittle of the truth; but hope, so long deferred, spurred
them on, and they spared themselves nothing, secure at least in the
knowledge that a general confession to her was, when compared with
acknowledgment made alone and unaided before grieved and disillusioned
parents, of two evils most certainly the lesser. They needed five
dollars, they told her, after their consciences were, for the time
being, freed--just five hundred times the amount which Roger had
unearthed from his pockets, and which was the sole wealth among them.
They named the sum with hesitation; it was appallingly large in those
days; but it was the necessary aggregate which must be extorted from
them by sundown if their parents were to remain in ignorance.
“I see,” said Mary Christmas, once the miserable tale was told, her
stern, sharp eyes scrutinizing each guilty face. “I see.” Surely the
first person singular, present indicative of that simple verb had never
before been burdened with such weighty disapproval!
Then she produced the five dollars, which was wrapped with other bills,
quite bewildering to the boys, in folds of white cloth and hidden deep
within her gold-laced bodice; but she did not give it to them until she
had exacted from each a twofold promise of upright living in the future
and of reimbursement from their own earnings in the spring. Sitting
at the foot of the boulder in the middle of their circle, she made a
swift reckoning of the amount due her from each boy, which amounts
she wrote on slips of paper, a separate slip for the pocket of each
blouse. Only to John she gave none, considering him more sinned against
than sinning, and warning them all against leading those younger than
themselves into wrongdoing. Him she kept with her, reluctant as he was
for once to stay, while she sent the others, in whose breasts relief
was fast conquering repentance, on a two-mile journey through the woods
to apologize to the farmer and to pay their just indebtedness.
Be it said to her credit that she collected the five dollars, even to
the uttermost farthing. It was returned to her the following spring,
as she had demanded, by boys who approached her singly from every
conceivable hiding-place along the road and proffered hard-earned
coins in bits of dirty paper. Be it said, too, that two months after
the incident by the boulder, her own conscience troubling her by the
thought that she might have wronged him who had been for so long her
friend, she wrote a full account of it to Mr. Wescott, confessing
freely her part as protector, but asking that, if possible, the
children be not punished. Mr. Wescott smiled over Mary Christmas’
letter, which he shared with Mrs. Wescott in the seclusion of the
library. It lacked the ease and growing accuracy of her speech,
and was, in parts, with its self-abasement and anxious queries,
inexpressibly funny. Then, because he was conservative in parenthood as
well as in politics, he said not a word to John and Roger, though he
did contrive that winter to put in the way of his older son more than
the usual opportunities for earning an honest penny.