“Dear me,” he said, “not till October! What a rush! How well I remember
in Ancient Egypt--as I think you call it--seeing them getting out their
Christmas things, all cut in hieroglyphics, always two or three years
ahead.”
“Two or three years!” I exclaimed.
“Pooh,” said Time, “that was nothing. Why in Babylon they used to get
their Christmas jokes ready--all baked in clay--a whole Solar eclipse
ahead of Christmas. They said, I think, that the public preferred them
so.”
“Egypt?” I said. “Babylon? But surely, Father Time, there was no
Christmas in those days. I thought--”
“My dear boy,” he interrupted gravely, “don’t you know that there has
always been Christmas?”
I was silent. Father Time had moved across the room and stood beside the
fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece. The little wreaths of smoke from
the fading fire seemed to mingle with his shadowy outline.
“Well,” he said presently, “what is it that is wrong with Christmas?”
“Why,” I answered, “all the romance, the joy, the beauty of it has gone,
crushed and killed by the greed of commerce and the horrors of war. I am
not, as you thought I was, a hundred years old, but I can conjure up,
as anybody can, a picture of Christmas in the good old days of a hundred
years ago: the quaint old-fashioned houses, standing deep among the
evergreens, with the light twinkling from the windows on the snow; the
warmth and comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth; the
merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little children with their
eyes dancing in the Christmas fire-light, waiting for Father Christmas
in his fine mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the
presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it,” I added, “as if it were
yesterday.”
“It was but yesterday,” said Father Time, and his voice seemed to soften
with the memory of bygone years. “I remember it well.”
“Ah,” I continued, “that was Christmas indeed. Give me back such days
as those, with the old good cheer, the old stage coaches and the gabled
inns and the warm red wine, the snapdragon and the Christmas-tree, and
I’ll believe again in Christmas, yes, in Father Christmas himself.”
“Believe in him?” said Time quietly. “You may well do that. He happens
to be standing outside in the street at this moment.”
“Outside?” I exclaimed. “Why don’t he come in?”
“He’s afraid to,” said Father Time. “He’s frightened and he daren’t come
in unless you ask him. May I call him in?”
I signified assent, and Father Time went to the window for a moment and
beckoned into the darkened street. Then I heard footsteps, clumsy and
hesitant they seemed, upon the stairs. And in a moment a figure
stood framed in the doorway--the figure of Father Christmas. He stood
shuffling his feet, a timid, apologetic look upon his face.
How changed he was!
I had known in my mind’s eye, from childhood up, the face and form of
Father Christmas as well as that of Old Time himself. Everybody knows,
or once knew him--a jolly little rounded man, with a great muffler wound
about him, a packet of toys upon his back and with such merry, twinkling
eyes and rosy cheeks as are only given by the touch of the driving snow
and the rude fun of the North Wind. Why, there was once a time, not
yet so long ago, when the very sound of his sleigh-bells sent the blood
running warm to the heart.
But now how changed.
All draggled with the mud and rain he stood, as if no house had
sheltered him these three years past. His old red jersey was tattered in
a dozen places, his muffler frayed and ravelled.
The bundle of toys that he dragged with him in a net seemed wet and worn
till the cardboard boxes gaped asunder. There were boxes among them, I
vow, that he must have been carrying these three past years.
But most of all I noted the change that had come over the face of Father
Christmas. The old brave look of cheery confidence was gone. The smile
that had beamed responsive to the laughing eyes of countless children
around unnumbered Christmas-trees was there no more. And in the place of
it there showed a look of timid apology, of apprehensiveness, as of one
who has asked in vain the warmth and shelter of a human home--such a
look as the harsh cruelty of this world has stamped upon the faces of
its outcasts.
So stood Father Christmas shuffling upon the threshold, fumbling his
poor tattered hat in his hand.
“Shall I come in?” he said, his eyes appealingly on Father Time.
“Come,” said Time. He turned to speak to me, “Your room is dark. Turn up
the lights. He’s used to light, bright light and plenty of it. The dark
has frightened him these three years past.”
I turned up the lights and the bright glare revealed all the more
cruelly the tattered figure before us.
Father Christmas advanced a timid step across the floor. Then he paused,
as if in sudden fear.
“Is this floor mined?” he said.
“No, no,” said Time soothingly. And to me he added in a murmured
whisper, “He’s afraid. He was blown up in a mine in No Man’s Land
between the trenches at Christmas-time in 1914. It broke his nerve.”
“May I put my toys on that machine gun?” asked Father Christmas timidly.
“It will help to keep them dry.”
“It is not a machine gun,” said Time gently. “See, it is only a pile of
books upon the sofa.” And to me he whispered, “They turned a machine gun
on him in the streets of Warsaw. He thinks he sees them everywhere since
then.”
“It’s all right, Father Christmas,” I said, speaking as cheerily as I
could, while I rose and stirred the fire into a blaze. “There are no
machine guns here and there are no mines. This is but the house of a
poor writer.”
“Ah,” said Father Christmas, lowering his tattered hat still further and
attempting something of a humble bow, “a writer? Are you Hans Andersen,
perhaps?”
“Not quite,” I answered.
“But a great writer, I do not doubt,” said the old man, with a humble
courtesy that he had learned, it well may be, centuries ago in the
yule-tide season of his northern home. “The world owes much to its great
books. I carry some of the greatest with me always. I have them here--”
He began fumbling among the limp and tattered packages that he carried.
“Look! _The House that Jack Built_--a marvellous, deep thing, sir--and
this, _The Babes in the Wood_. Will you take it, sir? A poor present,
but a present still--not so long ago I gave them in thousands every
Christmas-time. None seem to want them now.”
He looked appealingly towards Father Time, as the weak may look towards
the strong, for help and guidance.
“None want them now,” he repeated, and I could see the tears start in
his eyes. “Why is it so? Has the world forgotten its sympathy with the
lost children wandering in the wood?”
“All the world,” I heard Time murmur with a sigh, “is wandering in the
wood.” But out loud he spoke to Father Christmas in cheery admonition,
“Tut, tut, good Christmas,” he said, “you must cheer up. Here, sit in
this chair the biggest one; so--beside the fire. Let us stir it to a
blaze; more wood, that’s better. And listen, good old Friend, to the
wind outside--almost a Christmas wind, is it not? Merry and boisterous
enough, for all the evil times it stirs among.”
Old Christmas seated himself beside the fire, his hands outstretched
towards the flames. Something of his old-time cheeriness seemed to
flicker across his features as he warmed himself at the blaze.
“That’s better,” he murmured. “I was cold, sir, cold, chilled to the
bone. Of old I never felt it so; no matter what the wind, the world
seemed warm about me. Why is it not so now?”
“You see,” said Time, speaking low in a whisper for my ear alone, “how
sunk and broken he is? Will you not help?”
“Gladly,” I answered, “if I can.”
“All can,” said Father Time, “every one of us.”
Meantime Christmas had turned towards me a questioning eye, in which,
however, there seemed to revive some little gleam of merriment.
“Have you, perhaps,” he asked half timidly, “schnapps?”
“Schnapps?” I repeated.
“Ay, schnapps. A glass of it to drink your health might warm my heart
again, I think.”
“Ah,” I said, “something to drink?”
“His one failing,” whispered Time, “if it is one. Forgive it him. He was
used to it for centuries. Give it him if you have it.”
“I keep a little in the house,” I said reluctantly perhaps, “in case of
illness.”
“Tut, tut,” said Father Time, as something as near as could be to a
smile passed over his shadowy face. “In case of illness! They used to
say that in ancient Babylon. Here, let me pour it for him. Drink, Father
Christmas, drink!”
Marvellous it was to see the old man smack his lips as he drank his
glass of liquor neat after the fashion of old Norway.
Marvellous, too, to see the way in which, with the warmth of the fire
and the generous glow of the spirits, his face changed and brightened
till the old-time cheerfulness beamed again upon it.
He looked about him, as it were, with a new and growing interest.
“A pleasant room,” he said. “And what better, sir, than the wind without
and a brave fire within!”
Then his eye fell upon the mantelpiece, where lay among the litter of
books and pipes a little toy horse.
“Ah,” said Father Christmas almost gayly, “children in the house!”
“One,” I answered, “the sweetest boy in all the world.”
“I’ll be bound he is!” said Father Christmas and he broke now into a
merry laugh that did one’s heart good to hear. “They all are! Lord bless
me! The number that I have seen, and each and every one--and quite right
too--the sweetest child in all the world. And how old, do you say? Two
and a half all but two months except a week? The very sweetest age of
all, I’ll bet you say, eh, what? They all do!”
And the old man broke again into such a jolly chuckling of laughter that
his snow-white locks shook upon his head.
“But stop a bit,” he added. “This horse is broken. Tut, tut, a hind leg
nearly off. This won’t do!”
He had the toy in his lap in a moment, mending it. It was wonderful to
see, for all his age, how deft his fingers were.
“Time,” he said, and it was amusing to note that his voice had assumed
almost an authoritative tone, “reach me that piece of string. That’s
right. Here, hold your finger across the knot. There! Now, then, a bit
of beeswax. What? No beeswax? Tut, tut, how ill-supplied your houses
are to-day. How can you mend toys, sir, without beeswax? Still, it will
stand up now.”