"If we took the day before Christmas an' had it for Christmas," observed
Tab Winslow, "would that hurt?"
"Eat your oatmeal," said Mis' Winslow, in the immemorial manner of
adults.
"Would it, would it, would it?" persisted Tab, in the immemorial manner
of youth.
"And have Theophilus Thistledown for dinner that day instead?" Mis'
Winslow suggested with diplomacy.
On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence.
But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult
manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry
window at the sparrows on the bird box.
"It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to
have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to
her, so."
He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard
no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of
the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down the road to Ellen
Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or
in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to
informalities.
Ellen was cleaning her silver. She had "six of each"--six knives, six
forks, six spoons, all plated and seldom used, pewter with black handles
serving for every day. The silver was cleaned often, though it was never
on the table, save for company, and there never had been any company
since Ellen had lost her little boy from fever. Having no
articulateness and having no other outlet for emotion, she fed her grief
by small abstentions: no guests, no diversions, no snatches of song
about her work. Yet she was sane enough, and normal, only in dearth of
sane and normal outlets for emotion, for energy, for personality, she
had taken these strange directions for yet unharnessed forces.
"Mercy," observed Mis' Winslow, warming her hands at the cooking stove,
"you got more energy."
"... than family, I guess you mean," Ellen Bourne finished. Ellen was
little and fair, with slightly drooping head, and eyebrows curved to a
childlike reflectiveness.
"Well, I got consider'ble more family than I got energy," said Mis'
Winslow, "so I guess we even it up. Seven-under-fifteen eats up energy
like so much air."
"Hey, king and country," said Ellen's old father, whittling by the fire,
"you got family enough, Ellen. You got your hands full of us." He rubbed
his hands through his thin upstanding silver hair on his little pink
head, and his fine, pink face took on the look of father which rarely
intruded, now, on his settled look of old man.
"I donno what she'd do," said Ellen's mother, "with any more around here
to pick up after. We're cluttered up enough, as it is." She was an old
lady of whose outlines you took notice before your attention lay further
upon her--angled waist, chin, lips, forehead, put on her a succession of
zigzags. But her eyes were awake, and it was to be seen that she did not
mean what she said and that she was looking anxiously at Ellen in the
hope of having deceived her daughter. Ellen smiled at her brightly, and
was not deceived.
"I keep pretty busy," she said.
Mis' Abby Winslow, who was not deceived either, hastened to the subject
of Mary.
"I should think Mary Chavah had enough to do, too," she said, "but she's
going to take Lily's little boy. Had you heard?"
"No," Ellen said, and stopped shaving silver polish.
"He's coming in two weeks," Mis' Winslow imparted; "she told me so
herself. She's got his room fixed up with owls on the wall paper. She's
bought him a washbasin with a rim of puppies, and a red stocking cap. I
saw her."
"How old is he?" Ellen asked, and worked again.
"I never thought to ask her," Mis' Winslow confessed; "he must be quite
a little fellow. But he's coming alone from some place out West."
"Hey, king and country," Ellen's father said; "I'd hate to have a boy
come here, with my head the way it is."
"And keeping the house all upset," Ellen's mother said, and asked Mis'
Winslow some question about Mary; and when she turned to Ellen again,
"Why, Ellen Bourne," she said, "you've shaved up every bit of that
cleaning polish and we're most done cleaning."
Ellen was looking at Mis' Winslow: "If you see her," Ellen said, "you
ask her if I can't do anything to help."
Later in the day, happening in at Mis' Mortimer Bates's, Mis' Winslow
found Mis' Moran there before her, and asked what they had heard "about
Mary Chavah." Something in that word "about" pricks curiosity its
sharpest. "Have you heard about Mary Chavah?" "It's too bad about Mary
Chavah." "Isn't it queer about Mary Chavah?"--each of these is like
setting flame to an edge of tissue. Omit "about" from the language, and
you abate most gossip. At Mis' Winslow's phrase, both women's eyebrows
curved to another arc.
Mis' Winslow told them.
"Ain't that nice?" said Mis' Moran, wholeheartedly; "I couldn't bring up
another, not with my back. But I'm glad Mary's going to know what it
is...."
Mis' Mortimer Bates was glad, too, but being by nature a nonconformist,
she took exception.
"It's an awful undertaking for a single-handed woman," she observed.
But this sort of thing she said almost unconsciously, and the other two
women regarded it with no more alarm than any other reflex.
"It's no worse starting single-handed than being left single-handed,"
offered Mis' Winslow somewhat ambiguously. "Lots does that's thrifty."
"Seems as if we could do a little something to help her get ready,
seem's though," Mis' Moran suggested; "I donno what."
"I thought I'd slip over after supper and ask her," Mis' Winslow said;
"maybe I'd best go now--and come back and tell you what she says."
Mis' Winslow found Mary Chavah sitting by her pattern bookcase, cutting
out a pattern. Mary's face was flushed and her eyes were bright, and she
went on with her pattern, thrilled by it as by any other creating.
"I just thought of this," Mary explained, looking vaguely at her
visitor. "It come to me like a flash when I was working on Mis' Bates's
basque. Will you wait just a minute, and then I'll explain it out to
you."
Without invitation, Mis' Winslow laid aside her coat and waited,
watching Mary curiously. She was cutting and folding and pinning her
tissue paper, oblivious of any presence. Alarm, suspense, doubt,
solution, triumph, came and went, and neither woman was conscious that
the flame of creation burned and breathed in the room as truly as if the
product were to be acknowledged.
"There!" Mary cried at last. "See it--can't you see it?--in gray wool?"
It was the pattern for a boy's topcoat, cunningly cut in new lines of
seam and revers, with a pocket, a bit of braid, a line of buttons laid
in as delicately as the factors in any other good composition. Mis'
Winslow inevitably recognized its utility, exclaimed, and wondered.
"Mary Chavah! How did you know how to do things for children?"
"How did you know how?" Mary inquired coolly.
"Why, I've had 'em," Mis' Winslow offered simply.
"Do you honestly think that makes any difference?" Mary asked.
Mis' Winslow gasped, in the immemorial belief that the physical basis of
motherhood is the guarantee of both spiritual and physical equipment.
"Could you have cut out that coat?" Mary asked.
Mis' Winslow shook her head. She was of those whose genius is for
cutting over.
"Well," said Mary, "I could. It ain't having 'em that teaches you to do
for 'em. You either know how, or you don't know how. That's all."
Mis' Winslow reflected that she could never make Mary understand--though
any mother, she thought complacently, would know in a minute. The
cutting of the coat did give her pause; but then, she summed it up,
coat included, "Mary was queer"--and let it go at that.
"I didn't know," Mis' Winslow said then, "but what I could help you some
about the little boy's coming. Seven-under-fifteen does teach you
something, you've got to allow. Mebbe I could tell you something, now
and then. Or if we could do anything to help you get ready for him...."
"Oh," said Mary, in swift penitence, "thank you, Mis' Winslow. After he
comes, maybe. But these things now I don't mind doing. The real
nuisance'll come afterwards, I s'pose."
Mis' Winslow smiled in soft triumph.
"_Nuisance!_" she said. "That's what I meant comes to you by having 'em.
You don't think so much of the nuisance part as you did before."
"Then you don't look the thing in the face," said Mary, calmly. "That's
all about that."
"Well," Mis' Winslow said pacifically, "when's he coming?"
"A week from Tuesday. A week from to-morrow," Mary told her.
Mis' Winslow looked at her intently, with the light of calculation in
her narrowed eyes.
"A week from Tuesday," she said. "A week from Tuesday," she repeated.
"_A week from Tuesday!_" she exclaimed. "Why, Mary Chavah. That's
Christmas Eve."
It was some matter of recipes that was absorbing Mis' Bates and Mis'
Moran when Mis' Winslow breathlessly returned to them. They were deep in
tradition, and in method, its buttonhole relation. During the weary
period when nutrition has been one of the two great problems the
tremendous impulse that has nourished the world was alive in the faces
of the two women, a kind of creative fire, such as had burned in Mary at
the cutting of her pattern. Asparagus escalloped with toast crumbs and
butter was for the moment symbol of all humanity's will to keep alive.
"Ladies," said Mis' Winslow, with no other preface, "what do you think?
Mary Chavah's little boy is coming from Idaho with a tag on, and when do
you s'pose he's going to get here? Christmas Eve."
"Christmas Eve," repeated Mis' Bates, whose mind never lightly forsook
old ways or embraced a contretemps; "what a funny time to travel."
"Likely catch the croup and be down sick on Mary's hands the first
thing," said Mis' Moran. "It's a pity it ain't the Spring of the year."
Mis' Winslow looked at them searchingly to see if her thought too far
outdistanced theirs.
"What struck me all of a heap," she said, "is his getting here then.
_That_ night. Christmas Eve."
The three woman looked at one another.
"That's so," Mis' Moran said.
"Him--that child," Mis' Winslow put it, "getting here Christmas Eve,
used to Christmas all his life, ten to one knowing in his head what he
hopes he'll get. And no Christmas. And him with no mother. And her only
a month or so dead."
"Well," said Mis' Mortimer Bates, "it's too bad it's happened so. But it
has happened so. You have to say that to your life quite often, I
notice. I don't know anything to do but to say it now."
Mis' Winslow had not taken off her cloak. She sat on the edge of her
chair, with her hands deep in its pockets, her black knit "fascinator"
fallen back from her hair. She was looking down at her cloth overshoes,
and she went on speaking as if she had hardly heard what Mis' Bates had
interposed.
"He'll get in on the express," she said; "Mary said so. She don't have
to go to the City to meet him. The man he travels with is going to put
him on the train in the City. The little fellow'll get here after dark.
After dark on Christmas Eve."
"And no time for anybody to warn him that there won't be any Christmas
waiting for him," Mis' Moran observed thoughtfully.
"And like enough he'll bring a little something for Mary for a present,"
Mis' Winslow went on. "How'll she feel _then_?"
"Ain't it too bad it ain't last year?" Mis' Moran mourned. "Everything
comes too late or too soon or not at all or else too much so, 'seems
though."
Mis' Bates's impulse to nonconformity had not prevented her forehead
from being drawn in their common sympathy; but it was a sympathy that
saw no practical way out and existed tamely as a high window and not as
a wide door.
"Well," she said, "Mary ain't exactly the one to see it so. You'll never
get her to feel bad about anybody not having a Christmas. I donno, if it
was any other year, as she'd be planning any different."
"No," said Mis' Winslow, thoughtfully, "Mary won't do anything. But we
could."
Mis' Bates's forehead took alarm--the alarm of the sympathetic hearer
who is challenged to be doer.
"_Do?_" she repeated. "You can't go back on the paper at this late day.
And you can't give him a Christmas and every other of our children not
have any just because we're their parents and still living. There ain't
a thing to do."
Mis' Winslow's eyes were still on her overshoes. "I don't believe
there's _never_ 'not a thing' to do," she said, "I don't believe it."
Mis' Bates looked scandalized. "That's nonsense," she said sharply, "and
it's sacrilegious besides. When God means a thing to happen, there's not
a thing to do. What about earthquakes and--and cancers?"
"I don't believe he ever means earthquakes and cancers," said Mis'
Winslow, to her overshoes.
"Prevent 'em, then!" challenged Mis' Bates, triumphantly.
Mis' Winslow looked up. Her eyes were shining as they had shone
sometimes when one of her seven-under-fifteen had given its first sign
of consciousness of more than self.
"I believe we'll do it some day," she said. "I believe there's more to
us than we've got any idea of. I believe there's so much to us that one
of us that found out about it and told the rest would get hounded out of
town. But even now, I bet there's enough to us to do something every
time--something every time, no matter what. And I believe there's
something we can do about this little orphaned boy's Christmas, if we
nip our brains on to it in the right place."
"Oh, dear," said Mis' Moran, "sometimes when I think about Christmas I
almost wish we almost hadn't done the way we're going to do."
Mis' Bates stiffened.
"Jane Moran," she said, "do you think it's right to go head over heels
in debt to celebrate the birth of our Lord?"
"No," said Mis' Moran, "I don't. But--"
"And you know nobody in Old Trail Town could afford any extravagance
this year?"
"Yes," said Mis' Moran, "I do. Still--"
"And if part could and part couldn't, that makes it all the worse, don't
it?"
"I know," said Mis' Moran, "I know."
"Well, then," said Mis' Bates triumphantly, "we've done the only way
there is to do. Land knows, I wish there was another way. But there
ain't."
Mis' Winslow looked up from her overshoes.
"I don't believe there's never 'no other way,'" she said. "There's
always another way...."
"Not without money," said Mis' Bates.
"Money," Mis' Winslow said, "money. That's like setting up one day of
peace on earth, good will to men, and asking admission to it."
"Mis' Winslow," said Mis' Moran, sadly, "what's the use of saying
anything? You know as well as I do that Christmas is abused all up and
down the land, and made a day of expense and extravagance and folks
overspending themselves. And we've stopped all that in Old Trail Town.
And now you're trying to make us feel bad."
"I ain't," said Mis' Winslow, "we felt bad about it already, and you
know it. I'm glad we've stopped all that. But I wish't we had something
to put in its place. I wish't we had."
"What in time are them children doing?" said Mis' Moran, abruptly.
The three women looked. On the side lawn, where a spreading balsam had
been left untrimmed to the ground, stood little Emily Moran and Gussie
and Bennet and Tab and Pep. And the four boys had their caps in their
hands, and Gussie, having untied her own hood, turned to take off little
Emily's. The wind, sweeping sharply round the corner of the house, blew
their hair wildly and caught at muffler ends. Mis' Bates and Mis'
Moran, with one impulse, ran to the side door, and Mis' Winslow
followed.
"Emily," said Mis' Moran, "put on your hood this minute."
"Gussie," said Mis' Bates, "put on your cap this instant second. What
you got it off for? And little Emily doing as you do--I'm su'prised at
you."
The children consulted briefly, then Pep turned to the two women, by now
coming down the path, Mis' Bates with her apron over her head, Mis'
Moran in her shawl.
"Please," said Pep, "it's a funeral. An' we thought we'd ought to take
our caps off till it gets under."
"A funeral," said Mis' Bates. "Who you burying?"
"It's just a rehearsal funeral," Pep explained; "the real one's going to
be Christmas."
By now the two women were restoring hood and stocking cap to the little
girls, and it was Mis' Winslow, who had followed, who spoke to Pep.
"Who's dead, Pep?" she asked.
Between the belief of "Who's dead?" and the skepticism of "Who you
burying?" the child was swift to distinguish.
"Sandy Claus," he answered readily.
Mis' Winslow stood looking down at him. Pep stepped nearer.
"We're doing it for little Emily," he said confidentially. "She couldn't
get it straight about where Sandy Claus would be this Christmas. The
rest of us--knew. But Emily's little--so we thought we'd play bury him
on her 'count."
Mis' Bates, who had not heard, turned from Gussie.
"Going to do _what_ on Christmas?" she exclaimed. "You ain't to do a
thing on Christmas. Or ain't you grown up, after all?"
"Well, we thought a Christmas funeral wouldn't hurt," interposed Bennet,
defensively. "Can't we even have a funeral for fun on Christmas?" he
ended, aggrieved.
"It's Sandy Claus's funeral," observed little Emily putting a curl from
her face.
"We're goin' dress up a Sandy Claus, you know," Pep added, _sotto voce_.
"It's going to be right after breakfast, Christmas."
"Come on, come ahead, fellows," said Bennet; "I'll be corpse. Keep your
lids on. I don't mind. Go ahead, sing."
Already Mis' Winslow was walking back to the house; the other two women
overtook her; and from the porch they heard the children begin to
sing:--
"_Go bury Saint Nicklis...._"
The rest was lost in the closing of the door.
Back in the sitting room the women stood looking at one another. Mis'
Bates was frowning and all Mis' Moran's expressions were on the verge
of dissolving; but in Mis' Winslow's face it was as though she had found
some new way of consciousness.
"Ladies," Mis' Winslow said, "them children are out there pretending to
bury Santa Claus--and so are we. And I bet we can't any of us do it."
In the room, there was a moment of silence in which familiar things
seemed to join with their way of saying, "We've been keeping still all
the while!" Then Mis' Winslow pushed her hair, regardless of its
parting, straight back from her forehead,--a gesture with which she
characterized any moment of stress.
"Ladies," she said, "I don't want we should go back on our paper,
either. But mebbe there's more to Christmas than it knows about--or than
we know about. Mebbe we can do something that won't interfere with the
paper we've all signed, and yet that'll be something that is something.
Mebbe they's things to use that ain't never been used yet.... Oh, I
donno. Nor I guess you donno. But let's us find out!"