Ebenezer Rule had meant to go to the City before cold weather came. He
had there a small and decent steam-warmed flat where he boiled his own
eggs and made his own coffee, read his newspapers and kept his counsel,
descending nightly to the ground-floor café to dine on ambiguous dishes
at tables of other bank swallows who nested in the same cliff. But as
the days went by, he found himself staying on in Old Trail Town, with
this excuse and that, offered by himself to himself. As, for example,
that in the factory there were old account books that he must go
through. And having put off this task from day to day and finding at
last nothing more to dally with, he set out one morning for the ancient
building down in that part of the village which was older than the rest
and was where his business was conducted when it was conducted.
It had snowed in the night, and Buff Miles, who drove the village
snowplow, was also driver of "the 'bus." So on the morning after a
snowfall, the streets always lay buried thick until after the 8.10
Express came in; and since on the morning following a snowfall the 8.10
Express was always late, Old Trail Town lay locked in a kind of circular
argument, and everybody stayed indoors or stepped high through drifts.
The direct way to the factory was virtually untrodden, and Ebenezer made
a detour through the business street in search of some semblance of a
"track."
The light of a Winter morning is not kind, only just. It is just to the
sky and discovers it to be dominant; to trees, and their lines are seen
to be alive, like leaves; to folk, and no disguise avails. Summer gives
complements and accessories to the good things in a human face. Winter
affords nothing save disclosure. In the uncompromising cleanness of that
wash of Winter light, Ebenezer Rule was himself, for anybody to see.
Looking like countless other men, lean, alert, preoccupied, his tall
figure stooped, his smooth, pale face like a photograph too much
retouched, this commonplace man took his place in the day almost as one
of its externals. With that glorious pioneer trio, mineral, vegetable
and animal; and with intellect, that worthy tool, he did his day's work.
His face was one that had never asked itself, say, of a Winter morning:
_What else?_ And the Winter light searched him pitilessly to find that
question somewhere in him.
Before the Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange, Simeon Buck
himself had just finished shoveling his walk, and stood wiping his snow
shovel with an end of his muffler. When he saw Ebenezer, he shook the
muffler at him, and then, over his left shoulder, jabbed the air with
his thumb.
"Look at here," he said, his head reënforcing his gesture toward his
show window, "look what I done this morning. Nice little touch--eh?"
In the show window of the Exchange--Dry Goods Exchange was just the name
of it for the store carried everything--a hodgepodge of canned goods,
lace curtains, kitchen utensils, wax figures, and bird cages had been
ranged round a center table of golden oak. On the table stood a figure
that was as familiar to Old Trail Town as was its fire engine and its
sprinkling cart. Like these, appearing intermittently, the figure had
seized on the imagination of the children and grown in association until
it belonged to everybody, by sheer use and wont. It was a _papier-mâché_
Santa Claus, three feet high, white-bearded, gray-gowned, with tall
pointed cap--rather the more sober Saint Nicholas of earlier days than
the rollicking, red-garbed Saint Nick of now. Only, whereas for years he
had graced the window of the Exchange, bearing over his shoulder a
little bough of green for a Christmas tree, this season he stood
treeless, and instead bore on his shoulder a United States flag. On a
placard below him Simeon had laboriously lettered:--
High Cost of Living
and too much fuss
Makes Folks want a
Sane Christmas
Me Too. S. C.
"Ain't that neat?" said Simeon.
Ebenezer looked. "What's the flag for?" he inquired dryly.
"Well," said Simeon, "he had to carry something. I thought of a toy
gun--but that didn't seem real appropriate. A Japanese umbrella wasn't
exactly in season, seems though. A flag was about the only thing I could
think of to have him hold. A flag is always kind of tasty, don't you
think?"
"Oh, it's harmless," Ebenezer said, "harmless."
"No hustling business," Simeon pursued, "can be contented with just
_not_ doing something. It ain't enough not to have no Christmas. You've
got to find something that'll express nothing, and express it forcible.
In business, a minus sign," said Simeon, "is as good as a plus, if you
can keep it whirling round and round."
This Ebenezer mulled and chuckled over as he went on down the street. He
wondered what the Emporium would do to keep up with the Exchange. But in
the Emporium window there was nothing save the usual mill-end display
for the winter white goods sale.
Ebenezer opened the store door and put his head in.
"Hey," he shouted at Abel, back at the desk, "can't you keep up with
Simeon's window?"
Abel came down the aisle between the lengths of white stuff plaited into
folds at either side. The fire had just been kindled in the stove, and
the air in the store was still frosty. Abel, in his overcoat, was
blowing on his fingers.
"I ain't much of any heart to," said he, "but the night before Christmas
I guess'll do about right for mine."
"What'll you put up?" Ebenezer asked, closing the door behind him.
"Well, sir," said Abel, "I ain't made up my mind full yet. But I'll be
billblowed if I'm going to let Christmas go by without saying something
about it in the window."
"Night before Christmas'll be too late to advertise anything," said
Ebenezer. "If I was in trade," he said, half closing his eyes, "I'd fill
my window up with useful articles--caps and mittens and stockings and
warm underwear and dishes and toothbrushes. And I'd say: 'Might as well
afford these on what you saved out of Christmas.' You'd ought to get all
the advertising you can out of any situation."
Abel shook his head.
"I ain't much on such," he said lightly--and then looked intently at
Ebenezer. "Jenny's been buying quite a lot here for her Christmas," he
said.
Ebenezer was blank. "Jenny?" he said. "Jenny Wing? I heard she was here.
I ain't seen her. Is she bound to keep Christmas anyhow?"
"Just white goods, it was," said Abel, briefly.
Ebenezer frowned his lack of understanding.
"I shouldn't think her and Bruce had much of anything to buy anything
with," he said. "I s'pose you know," he added, "that Bruce, the young
beggar, quit working for me in the City after the--the failure? Threw up
his job with me, and took God knows what to do."
Abel nodded gravely. All Old Trail Town knew that, and honoured Bruce
for it.
"Headstrong couple," Ebenezer added. "So Jenny's bent on having
Christmas, no matter what the town decides, is she?" he added, "it's
like her, the minx."
"I don't think it was planned that way," Abel said simply; "she's only
buying white goods," he repeated. And, Ebenezer still staring, "Surely
you know what Jenny's come home for?" Abel said.
A moment or two later Ebenezer was out on the street again, his face
turned toward the factory. He was aware that Abel caught open the door
behind him and called after him, "Whenever you get ready to sell me that
there star glass, you know...." Ebenezer answered something, but his
responses were so often guttural and indistinguishable that his will to
reply was regarded as nominal, anyway. He also knew that now, just
before him, Buff Miles was proceeding with the snowplow, cutting a firm,
white way, smooth and sparkling for soft treading, momentarily bordered
by a feathery flux, that tumbled and heaped and then lay quiet in a
glitter of crystals. But his thought went on without these things and
without his will.
Bruce's baby! It would be a Rule, too.... the third generation, the
third generation. And accustomed as he was to relate every experience to
himself, measure it, value it by its own value to him, the effect of his
reflection was at first single: The third generation of Rules. _Was he
as old as that?_
It seemed only yesterday that Bruce had been a boy, in a blue necktie to
match his eyes, and shoes which for some reason he always put on wrong,
so that the buttons were on the inside. Bruce's baby. Good heavens! It
had been a shock when Bruce graduated from the high school, a shock when
he had married, but his baby ... it was incredible that he himself
should be so old as that.
... This meant, then, that if Malcolm had lived, Malcolm might have had
a child now....
Ebenezer had not meant to think that. It was as if the Thought came and
spoke to him. He never allowed himself to think of that other life of
his, when his wife, Letty, and his son Malcolm had been living. Nobody
in Old Trail Town ever heard him speak of them or had ever been answered
when Ebenezer had been spoken to concerning them. A high white shaft in
the cemetery marked the two graves. All about them doors had been
closed. But with the thought of this third generation, the doors all
opened. He looked along ways that he had forgotten.
As he went he was unconscious, as he was always unconscious, of the
little street. He saw the market square, not as the heart of the town,
but as a place for buying and selling, and the little shops were to him
not ways of providing the town with life, but ways of providing their
keepers with a livelihood. Beyond these was a familiar setting, arranged
that day with white background and heaped roofs and laden boughs, the
houses standing side by side, like human beings. There they were, like
the chorus to the thing he was thinking about. They were all thinking
about it, too. Every one of them knew what he knew. Yet he never saw the
bond, but he thought they were only the places where men lived who had
been his factory hands and would be so yet if he had not cut them away:
Ben Torrey, shoveling off his front walk with his boy sweeping behind
him; August Muir, giving his little girl a ride on the snow shovel;
Nettie Hatch, clearing the ice out of her mail box, while her
sister--the lame one--watched from her chair by the window, interested
as in a real event. Ebenezer spoke to them from some outpost of
consciousness which his thought did not pass. The little street was not
there, as it was never there for him, as an entity. It was merely a
street. And the little town was not an entity. It was merely where he
lived. He went behind Buff Miles and the snowplow--as he always went--as
if space had been created for folk to live in one at a time, and as if
this were his own turn.
When he reached the bend from the Old Trail to the road where the
factory was, he understood at last that he had been hearing a song sung
over a great many times.
"... One for the way it all begun,
Two for the way it all has run,
What three'll be for I do forget,
But what's to be has not been yet....
So holly and mistletoe,
So holly and mistletoe,
So holly and mistletoe,
Over and over and over, oh."
Buff, who was singing it, looked over his shoulder, and nodded.
"They said you can't have no Christmas on Christmas Day," he observed,
grinning, "but I ain't heard nothing to prevent singing Christmas carols
right up to the day that is the day."
Ebenezer halted.
"How old are you?" he abruptly demanded of Buff--whom he had known from
Buff's boyhood.
"Thirty-three," said Buff, "dum it."
"You and Bruce about the same age, ain't you?" said Ebenezer.
Buff nodded.
"Well," said Ebenezer, "well...." and stood looking at him. Malcolm
would have been his age, too.
"Going down to the factory, are you?" Buff said. "Wait a bit. I'll hike
on down ahead of you."
He turned the snowplow down the factory road, as if he were making a
triumphal progress, fashioning his snow borders with all the freedom of
some sculpturing wind on summer clouds.
"One for the way it all begun,
Two for the way it all has run...."
he sang to the soft push and thud and clank of his going. He swept a
circle in front of the little house that was the factory office, as if
he had prepared the setting for a great event; and Ebenezer, following
in the long, bright path, stepped into the hall of the house.
For thirty years he had been accustomed to enter the little house with
his mind ready to receive its interior of desks and shelves and safes
and files. To-day, quite unexpectedly, as he opened the door, the thing
that was in his mind was a hall stair with a red carpet, and a parlour
adjoining with figured stuff at the windows and a coal fire in the
stove.... And thirty-five years ago it had been that way, when he and
his wife and child had lived in the little house where his business was
then just starting at a machine set up in the woodshed. As his project
had grown and his factory had arisen in the neighbouring lots, the
family had moved farther up in the town. Remembrance had been divorced
from this place for decades. To-day, without warning, it waited for him
on the threshold.
He had asked his bookkeeper to meet him there, but the man had not yet
arrived. So Ebenezer himself kindled a fire in the rusty office stove,
in the room where the figured curtains had been. The old account books
that he wanted were not here on the shelves, nor in the cupboards of the
cold adjoining rooms. They dated so far back that they had been filed
away upstairs. He had not been upstairs in years, and his first impulse
was to send his bookkeeper, when he should appear. But this, after all,
was not Ebenezer's way; and he went up the stairs himself.
Each upper room was like some one unconscious in stupor or death, and
still as distinct in personality as if in some ancient activity. There
was the shelf he had put up in their room, the burned place on the floor
where he had tipped over a lamp, tattered shreds of the paper she had
hung to surprise him, the little storeroom which they had cleared out
for Malcolm when he was old enough, and whose door had had to be kept
closed because innumerable uncaged birds lived there....
When he had gone through the piles of account books in a closet and
those he sought were not found among them, he remembered the trunkful up
in the tiny loft. He let down from the passage ceiling the ladder he had
once hung there, and climbed up to the little roof recess.
Light entered through four broken panes of skylight. It fell in a faint
rug on the dusty floor. The roof sloped sharply, and the trunks and
boxes had been pressed back to the rim of the place. Ebenezer put his
hands out, groping. They touched an edge of something that swayed. He
laid hold of it and drew it out and set down on the faint rug of light
a small wooden hobbyhorse.
He stood staring at it, remembering it as clearly as if some one had set
before him the old white gate which he bestrode in his own boyhood. It
was Malcolm's hobbyhorse, dappled gray, the tail and the mane missing
and the paint worn off--and tenderly licked off--his nose. When they had
moved to the other house, he had bought the boy a pony, and this horse
had been left behind. Something else stirred in his memory, the name by
which Malcolm had used to call his hobbyhorse, some ringing name ... but
he had forgotten. He thrust the thing back where it had been and went on
with his search for the account books.
By the time he had found them and had got down again in the office, the
bookkeeper was there, keeping up the fire and uttering, with some
acumen, comments on the obvious aspects of the weather, of the climate,
of the visible universe. The bookkeeper was a young man, very ready to
agree with Ebenezer for the sake of future favour, but with the
wistfulness of all industrial machines constructed by men from human
potentialities. Also, he had a cough and thin hands and a little family
and no job.
"Get to work on this book," Ebenezer bade him; "it's the one that began
the business."
The man opened the book, put it to his nearsighted eyes, frowned, and
glanced up at Ebenezer.
"I don't think it seems...." he began doubtfully.
"Well, don't think," said Ebenezer, sharply; "that's not needful. Read
the first entries."
[Illustration: "ACROSS THE STILL FIELDS CAME FLASHING THE POINT OF
FLAME"]