Mary Chavah sent her letter of blunt directions concerning her sister's
headstone and the few belongings which her sister had wished her to
have. The last lines of the letter were about the boy.
"Send the little one along. I am not the one, but I don't know what else
to tell you to do with him. Let me know when to expect him, and put his
name in with his things--I can't remember his right name."
When the answer came from John Blood, a fortnight later, it said that a
young fellow of those parts was starting back home shortly to spend
Christmas, and would take charge of the child as far as the City, and
there put him on his train for Old Trail Town. She would be notified
just what day to expect him, and John knew how glad his mother would
have been and his father too, and he was her grateful Nephew. P. S. He
would send some money every month "toward him."
The night after she received this letter, Mary lay long awake, facing
what it was going to mean to have him there: to have a child there.
She recalled what she had heard other women say about it,--stray
utterances, made with the burdened look that hid a secret complacency, a
kind of pleased freemasonry in a universal lot.
"The children bring so much sand into the house. You'd think it was
horses."
"... the center table looks loaded and ready to start half the time ...
but I can't help it, with the children's books and truck."
"... never would have another house built without a coat closet. The
children's cloaks and caps and rubbers litter up everything."
"... every one of their knees out, and their underclothes outgrown, and
their waists soiled, the whole time. And I do try so hard...."
Now with all these bewilderments she was to have to do. She wondered if
she would know how to dress him. Once she had watched Mis' Winslow dress
a child, and she remembered what unexpected places Mis' Winslow had
buttoned--buttonholes that went _up and down_ in the skirt bands, and so
on. Armholes might be too small and garters too tight, and how was one
ever to know? If it were a little girl now ... but a little boy.... What
would she talk to him about while they ate together?
[Illustration: "HE STOOD LOOKING AT IT FROM PART WAY ACROSS THE ROAD"]
She lay in the dark and planned--with no pleasure, but merely because
she always planned everything, her dress, her baking, what she would say
to this one and that. She would put up a stove in the back parlour, and
give him the room "off." She was glad that the parlour was empty and
clean--"no knick-knacks for a boy to knock around," she found herself
thinking. And a child would like the bedroom wallpaper, with the owl
border. When Summer came he could have the room over the dining room,
with the kitchen roof sloping away from it where he could dry his
hazelnuts--she had thought of the pasture hazelnuts, first thing. There
were a good many things a boy would like about the place: the bird house
where the martins always built, the hens, the big hollow tree, the
pasture ant hill.... She would have to find out the things he liked to
eat. She would have to help him with his lessons--she could do that for
only a little while, until he would be too old to need her. Then maybe
there would come the time when he would ask her things that she would
not know....
She fell asleep wondering how he would look. Already, not from any
impatience to have this done, but because that was the way in which she
worked, she had his room in order; and her picture of his father was by
the mirror, the young face of his father. Something faded had been
written below the picture, and this she had painstakingly rubbed away
before she set the picture in its place. Next day, while she was working
on Mis' Jane Moran's bead basque that was to be cut over and turned, she
laid it aside and cut out a jacket pattern, and a plaited waist
pattern--just to see if she could. These she rolled up impatiently and
stuffed away in her pattern bookcase.
"I knew how to do them all the while, and I never knew I knew," she
thought with annoyed surprise. "I s'pose I'll waste a lot of time
pottering over him."
It was so that she spent the weeks until the letter came telling her
what day the child would start. On the afternoon of the day the letter
came, she went down town to the Amos Ames Emporium to buy a washbasin
and pitcher for the room she meant the little boy to have. She stood
looking at a basin with a row of brown dogs around the rim, when over
her shoulder Mis' Abby Winslow spoke.
"You ain't buying a Christmas present for anybody, are you?" she asked
warningly.
Mary started guiltily and denied it.
"Well, what in time do you want with dogs on the basin?" Mis' Winslow
demanded.
Almost against her own wish, Mary told her. Mis' Winslow was one of
those whose faces are invariable forerunners of the sort of thing they
are going to say. With eyebrows, eyes, forehead, head, and voice she
took the news.
"He is! Forever and ever more. When's he going to get here?"
"Week after next," Mary said listlessly. "It's an awful responsibility,
ain't it--taking a child so?"
Mis' Winslow's face abruptly rejected its own anxious lines and let the
eyes speak for it.
"I always think children is like air," she said; "you never realize how
hard they're pressing down on you--but you do know you can't live
without them."
Mary looked at her, her own face not lighting.
"I'd rather go along like I am," she said; "I'm used to myself the way I
am."
"Mary Chavah!" said Mis' Winslow, sharply, "a vegetable sprouts. Can't
you? Is these stocking caps made so's they won't ravel?" she inquired
capably of Abel Ames. "These are real good value, Mary," she added
kindly. "Better su'prise the little thing with one of these. A red one."
Mary counted over her money, and bought the red stocking cap and the
basin with the puppies. Then she went into the street. The sense of
oppression, of striving, that had seldom left her since that night in
the stable, made the day a thing to be borne, to be breasted. The air
was thick with snow, and in the whiteness the dreary familiarity of the
drug store, the meat market, the post office, the Simeon Buck Dry Goods
Exchange, smote her with a passion to escape from them all, to breed new
familiars, to get free of the thing that she had said she would do.
"And I could," she thought; "I could telegraph to John not to send him.
But Jenny--she can't. I don't see how she stands it...."
The thought may have been why, instead of going home, she went to see
Jenny. A neighbor was in the sitting room with Mrs. Wing. Jenny met Mary
at the kitchen door and stood against a background of clothes drying on
lines stretched indoors.
"Don't you want to come upstairs?" Jenny said. "There ain't a fire up
there--but I can show you the things."
She had put them all in the bottom drawer, as women always do; and, as
women always do, had laid them so that all the lace and embroidery and
pink ribbons possible showed in a flutter when the drawer was opened.
Jenny took the things out, one at a time, unfolded, discussed, compared,
with all the tireless zeal of a robin with a straw in its mouth or of a
tree, blossoming. "Smell of them," Jenny bade her. "Honestly, wouldn't
you know by the smell who they are for?" "I donno but you would," Mary
admitted awkwardly, and marveled dumbly at the newness Jenny was
feeling in that which, after all, was not new!
When these things were all out, a little tissue-paper parcel was left
lying in the drawer.
"There's one more," Mary said.
Jenny flushed, hesitated, lifted it.
"That's nothing," she said; "before I came I made some little things for
its Christmas. I thought maybe it would come first, and we'd have the
Christmas in my room, and I made some little things--just for fun, you
know. But it won't be fair to do it now, with the whole town so set
against our having any Christmas. Mary, it just seems as though I had to
have a Christmas this year!"
"Oh, well," said Mary, "the baby'll be your Christmas. The town can't
help that, I guess."
"I know," Jenny flashed back brightly, "you and I have got the best of
them, haven't we? We've each got one present coming, anyway."
"I s'pose we have...." Mary said.
She looked at Jenny's Christmas things--a ribbon rattle, a crocheted
cap, a first picture book, a cascade of colored rings--and then in grim
humour at Jenny.
"It'll never miss its Christmas," she said dryly.
"Don't you think so?" said Jenny, soberly. "I donno. It seems as if it'd
be kind o' lonesome to get born around Christmas and not find any going
on."
She put the things away, and closed the drawer. For no appreciable
reason, she kept it locked, and the key under the bureau cover.
"Do you know yet when yours is coming?" Jenny asked, as she rose.
"Week after next," Mary repeated,--"two weeks from last night," she
confessed, "if he comes straight through."
"I think," said Jenny, "I think mine will be here--before then."
When they reached the foot of the stair, Mary unexpectedly refused to go
in the sitting room.
"No," she said, "I must be getting home. I just come out for a minute,
anyway. I'm--I'm much obliged for what you showed me," she added, and
hesitated. "I've got his room fixed up real nice. There's owls on the
wall paper and puppies on the washbasin," she said. "Come in when you
can and see it."
It was almost dusk when Mary reached home. While she was passing the
billboard at the corner--a flare of yellow letters, as if Colour and the
Alphabet had united to breed a monster--she heard children shouting. A
block away, and across the street, coming home from Rolleston's hill
where they had been coasting, were Bennet and Gussie Bates, little
Emily, Tab Winslow, and Pep. Nearly every day of snow they passed her
house. She always heard them talking, and usually she heard, across at
the corner, the click of the penny-in-the-slot machine, which no child
seemed able to pass without pulling. To-night, as she heard them coming,
Mary fumbled in her purse. Three, four, five pennies she found and ran
across the street and dropped them in the slot machine, and gained her
own door before the children came. She stood at her dark threshold, and
listened. She had not reckoned in vain. One of the children pushed down
on the rod, in the child's eternal hope of magic, and when magic came
and three, four, five chocolates dropped obediently in their hands, Mary
listened to what they said. It was not much, and it was not very
coherent, but it was wholly intelligible.
"Look at!" shrieked Bennet, who had made the magic.
"_Did_ it?" cried Gussie, and repeated the operation.
"It--it--it never!" said Tab Winslow, at the third.
"Make it again--make it again!" cried little Emily, and they did.
"Gorry," observed Pep, in ecstasy.
When it would give no more, they divided with the other children and ran
on, their red mittens and mufflers flaming in the snow. Mary stood
staring after them for a moment, then she closed her door.
"I wonder what made me do that," she thought.
In her dining room she mended the fire without taking off her hat. It
was curious, she reflected; here was this room looking the way it
looked, and away off there was the little fellow who had never seen the
room; and in a little while he would be calling this room home, and
looking for his books and his mittens, and knowing it better than any
other place in the world. And there was Jenny, with that bottom
drawerful, and pretty soon somebody that now was not, would be, and
would be wearing the drawerful and calling Jenny "mother," and would
know her better than any one else in the world. Mary could not imagine
that little boy of Lily's getting used to her--Mary--and calling
her--well, what would he call her? She hadn't thought of that....
"Bother," thought Mary Chavah, "there's going to be forty nuisances
about it that I s'pose I haven't even thought of yet."
She stood by the window. She had not lighted the lamp, so the world
showed white, not black. Snow makes outdoors look big, she thought. But
it was big--what a long journey it was to Idaho. Suppose ... something
happened to the man he was to travel with. John Blood was only a boy; he
would probably put the child's name and her address in the little
traveler's pocket, and these would be lost. The child was hardly old
enough to remember what to do. He would go astray, and none of them
would ever know what had become of him ... and what would become of him?
She saw him and his bundle of clothes alone in the station in the
City....
She turned from the window and mechanically mended the fire again. She
drew down the window shade and went to the coat closet to hang away her
wraps. Then abruptly she took up her purse, counted out the money in the
firelight, and went out the door and down the street in the dusk, and
into the post office, which was also the telegraph office,--one which
the little town owed to Ebenezer Rule, and it a rival to the other
telegraph office at the station.
"How much does it cost to send a telegram?" she demanded. "Idaho," she
answered the man's question, flushing at her omission.
While the man, Affer by name, laboriously looked it up,--covering
incredible little dirty figures with an incredibly big dirty
forefinger,--Mary stood staring at the list of names tacked below the
dog-eared Christmas Notice. She remembered that she had not yet signed
it herself. She asked for a pencil--causing confusion to the little
figures and delay to the big finger--and, while she waited, wrote her
name. "A good, sensible move," she thought, as she signed.
When Affer gave her the rate, thrusting finger and figures jointly
beneath the bars,--solicitous of his own accuracy,--Mary filed her
message. It was to John Blood, and it read:----
"Be sure you tie his tag on him good."