On that morning of the day before Christmas, Mary Chavah woke early,
while it was yet dark. With closed eyes she lay, in the grip of a dream
that was undissipated by her waking. In the dream she had seen a little
town lying in a hollow, lighted and peopled, but without foundation.
"It isn't born yet," they told her, who looked with her, "and the people
are not yet born."
"Who is the mother?" she had asked, as if everything must be born of
woman.
"You," they had answered.
On which the town had swelled and rounded and swung in a hollow of
cloud, globed and shining, like the world.
"You," they had kept on saying.
The sense that she must bear and mother the thing had grasped her with
all the sickening force of dream fear. And when the dream slipped into
the remembrance of what the day would bring her, the grotesque terror
hardly lessened, and she woke to a sense of oppression and coming
calamity such as not even her night of decision to take the child had
brought to her, a weight as of physical faintness and sickness.
"I feel as if something was going to happen," she said, over and over.
She was wholly ignorant that in that week just passed the word had been
liberated and had run round Old Trail Town in the happiest open
secrecy:--
"... coming way from Idaho, with a tag on, Christmas Eve. We thought if
everybody could call that night--just run into Mary's, you know, like it
was any other night, and take in a little something to eat--no presents,
you know ... oh, of course, no presents! Just supper, in a basket. We'd
all have to eat _some_-where. It won't be any Christmas celebration, of
course--oh, no, not with the paper signed and all. But just for us to
kind of meet and be there, when he gets off the train from Idaho."
"Just ... like it was any other night." That was the part that abated
suspicion. Indeed, that had been the very theory on which the
nonobservance of Christmas had been based: the day was to be treated
like any other day. And, obviously, on any other day such a simple plan
as this for the welcoming of a little stranger from Idaho would have
gone forward as a matter of course. Why deny him this, merely because
the night of his arrival chanced to be Christmas Eve? When Christmas was
to be treated _exactly_ as any other day?
If, in the heart of Mis' Abby Winslow, where the plan had originated, it
had originated side by side with the thought that the point of the plan
was the incidence of Christmas Eve, she kept her belief secret. The open
argument was unassailable, and she contented herself with that. Even
Simeon Buck, confronted with it, was silent.
"Goin' back on the paper, are you?" he had at first said, "and hev a
celebration?"
"Celebration of what?" Mis' Winslow demanded; "celebration of that
little boy getting here all alone, 'way from Idaho. And we'd celebrate
that any other night, wouldn't we? Of course we would. Our paper signing
don't call for us to give everybody the cold shoulder as I know of, just
because it's Christmas or Christmas Eve, either."
"No," Simeon owned, "of course it don't. Of course it don't."
As for Abel Ames, he accepted the proposal with an alacrity which he was
put to it to conceal.
"So do," he said heartily, "so do. I guess we can go ahead just like it
was a plain day o' the week, can't we?"
"Hetty," he said to his wife, whom that noon he went through the house
to the kitchen expressly to tell, "can you bake up a basket of stuff to
take over to Mary Chavah's next Tuesday night?"
She looked up from the loaf she was cutting, the habitual wonder of her
childish curved lashes accented by her sudden curving of eyebrows.
"Next Tuesday?" she said, "Why, that's Christmas eve!"
Abel explained, saying, "What of that?" and trying to speak
indifferently but, in spite of himself, shining through.
"Well, that's kind of nice to do, ain't it?" she answered.
"My, yes," Abel said, emphatically, "It's a thing to do--that's the
thing to do."
It was Mis' Mortimer Bates, the nonconformist by nature, in whom doubts
came nearest to expression.
"I _don't_ know," she said, "it kind of _does_ seem like hedging."
"They ain't anybody for it to seem to," Mis' Winslow contended
reasonably, "but us. And we understand."
"We was going to do entirely without a Christmas this year. Entirely
without," Mis' Bates rehearsed.
"Was we going to do entirely without everyday, week-day,
year-in-and-year-out milk of human kindness?" Mis' Winslow demanded.
"Well, then, let's us use a little of it, same as we would on a Monday
wash day."
No voice was raised in real protest. None who had signed the paper and
none who had not done so could take exception to this simple way of
hospitality to the little stranger with a tag on. And it was the glory
of the little town being a little town that they somehow let it be known
that every one was expected to look in at Mary's that night. No one was
uninvited. And this was like a part of the midwinter mystery expressing
itself unbidden.
Mary alone was not told. She had consistently objected to the Christmas
observances for so long that they feared the tyranny of her custom. "She
might not let us do it," they said, "but if we all get there, she can't
help liking it. She would on any other day...."
... So she alone in Old Trail Town woke that morning before Christmas
with no knowledge of this that was afoot. And yet the day was not like
any other day, because she lay there dreading it more.
She had cleared out her little sleeping room, as she had cleared the
lower floor. The chamber, with its white-plastered walls, and boards
nearly bare, and narrow white bed, had the look of a cell, in the first
light struggling through the single snow-framed window. Here, since her
childhood she had lain nightly; here she had brought her thought of Adam
Blood, and had seen the thought die and had watched with it; here she
had lain on the nights after her parents had died; here she had rested,
body-sick with fatigue, in the years that she had toiled to keep her
home. In all that time there had gone on within her many kinds of death.
She had arrived somehow at a dumb feeling that these dyings were
gradually uncovering her self from somewhere within; rather, uncovering
some self whose existence she only dimly guessed. "They's two of me,"
she had thought more often of late "and we don't meet--we don't meet."
She lived among her neighbors without hate, without malice; for years
she had "meant nothing but love"--and this not negatively. The rebellion
against Christmas was against only the falsity of its meaningless
observance. The rebellion against taking the child, though somewhat
grounded in her distrust of her own fitness, was really the last vestige
of a self that had clung to her, in bitterness not toward Adam, but
toward Lily. Ever since she had known that the child was coming she had
felt a kind of spiritual exhaustion, sharpened by the strange sense of
oppression that hung upon her like an illness.
"I feel as if something was going to happen," she kept saying.
In a little while she leaned toward the window at her bed's head, and
looked down the hill toward Jenny's. Her heart throbbed when she saw a
light there. Of late, when she had waked in the night, she had always
looked, but always until now the little house had been wrapped in the
darkness. Because of that light, she could not sleep again, and so
presently she rose, and in the sharp chill of the room, bathed and
dressed, though what had once been her savage satisfaction in braving
the cold had long since become mere undramatic ability to endure it
without thinking. With Mary, life and all its constructive rites had won
what the sacrificial has never been able to achieve--the soul of the
casual, of, so to say, second nature, which is last nature, and nature
triumphant.
While she was at breakfast Mis' Abby Winslow came in.
"Mercy," Mis' Winslow said, "is it breakfast--early? I've been up hours,
frosting the cakes."
"What cakes?" Mary asked idly.
Mis' Winslow flushed dully. "I ain't baked anything much in weeks
before," she answered ambiguously, and hurried from the subject.
"The little fellow's coming in on the Local, is he?" she said. "You
ain't heard anything different?"
"Nothing different," Mary replied. "Yes, of course he's coming. They
left there Saturday, or I'd have heard. The man he's with is going to
get home to-night for Christmas with his folks in the City."
"Going down to meet him of course, ain't you," Mis' Winslow pursued
easily.
"Why, yes," said Mary.
"Well," Mis' Winslow mounted her preparation, "I was thinking it would
be kind of dark for you to bring him in here all alone. Don't you want I
should come over and keep up the lights and be here when you get here?"
She watched Mary in open anxiety. If she were to refuse, it would go
rather awkwardly. To her delight Mary welcomed with real relief the
suggestion.
"I'd be ever so much obliged," she said; "I thought of asking somebody.
I'll have a little supper set out for him before I leave."
"Yes, of course," Mis' Winslow said, eyes down. "I'll be over about
seven," she added. "If the train's on time, you'll be back here around
half past. The children want to go down with you--they can be at Mis'
Moran's when you go by. You'll walk up from the depot, won't you? You
do," she said persuasively; "the little fellow'll be glad to stretch his
legs. And it'll give the children a chance to get acquainted."
"I might as well," Mary assented listlessly. "There's no need to hurry
home, as I know of, except keeping you waiting."
"Oh, I don't mind," Mis' Winslow told her. "Better come around through
town, too. It's some farther, but he'll like the lights. What's the
little chap's name?" she asked; "I donno's I've heard you say."
Mary flushed faintly. "Do you know," she said, "I don't know his name. I
can't remember that Lily ever told me. They always called him just
_Yes_, because he learned to say that first."
"'_Yes!_'" repeated Mis' Winslow, blankly. "Why, it don't sound to me
real human."
Later in the day, Mis' Mortimer Bates and Mis' Moran came in to see
Mary. Both were hurried and tired, and occasionally one of them lapsed
into some mental calculation. "We must remember something for the middle
of the table," Mis' Bates observed to Mis' Moran, under cover of Mary's
putting wood in the stove. And when Mary related the breaking of the
bracket lamp, the two other women telegraphed to each other a glance of
memorandum.
"Don't it seem funny to _you_ to have Christmas coming on to-morrow and
no flurry about it?" Mary asked.
"_No flurry!_" Mis' Bates burst out. "Oh, well," she amended, "of course
this Christmas does feel a little funny to all of us. Don't you think
so, Mis' Moran?"
"I donno," said Mary, thoughtfully, "but what, when folks stop chasing
after Christmas and driving it before them, Christmas may turn around
and come to find them."
"Mebbe so," Mis' Moran said with bright eyes, "mebbe so. Oh, Mary," she
added, "ain't it nice he's coming?"
Mary looked at them, frowning a little. "It seemed like the thing had to
happen," she said; "it'll fit itself in."
Before dark she took a last look about the child's room. The owl paper,
the puppy washbasin, the huge calendar with its picture of a stag, the
shelves for whatever things of his own he had, all pleased her newly.
She had laid on his table her grandfather's Bible with pictures of
Asiatic places. Below his mirror hung his father's photograph, that
young face, with the unspeakable wistfulness of youth, looking somewhere
outside the picture. It made her think of the passionate expectation in
the face of the picture that Jenny had brought.
"Young folks in pictures always look like they was setting store by
something that ain't true yet," Mary thought. "It makes you kind of feel
you have to pitch in and make whatever it is come true, a little...."
It was when Mis' Winslow came back toward seven o'clock that there was
news of Jenny. Mary had been twice to her door in the course of the
day, and had come away feeling, in her inquiry, strangely outside the
moment and alien to its incidence, as if she were somehow less alive
than those in Jenny's house.
"Jenny's got a little girl," Mis' Winslow said.
Mary stood staring at her. It seemed impossible. It was like seeing the
hands of time move, like becoming momentarily conscious of the swing and
rush of the earth, like perceiving the sweep of the stream of stars in
which our system moves.... She was startled and abashed that the news so
seized upon her. Little that had ever happened to herself seemed so
poignant, so warmed its place in sensation. While Mis' Winslow's mind
marked time on details of time and pounds, as is the way with us
immortals when another joins our ranks, Mary was receiving more
consciousness. There are times when this gift is laid on swiftly, as
with hands, instead of coming when none knows. Rather than with the
child whom she was to meet, her thought was with Jenny as she left Mis'
Winslow in the doorway and went down the street.
"Expect you back in about half an hour if the train's on time," Mis'
Winslow called.
Mary nodded, and turned into the great cathedral aisle that was Old
Trail Street, now arched and whitened, spectral in the dark, silver with
starlight....
... Capella was in the east, high and bright, and as imperative as
speech. Mary's way lay north, so that that great sun went beside her,
and there was no one else abroad but these two. A coat of ice had
polished the walks, so she went by the road, between the long white
mounds that lined it. The road, whose curves were absorbed in the
dimness, had thus lost its look of activity and lay inert as any frozen
waterway. Only a little wind, the star's sparkle, and Mary's step and
breath seemed living things--but from the rows of chimneys up and down
the Old Trail Road, faint smoke went up, a plume, a wreath, a veil,
where the village folk, invisible within quiet roof and wall, lifted
common signals; and from here a window and there a window, a light shone
out, a point, a ray, a glow, so that one without would almost say,
"There's home."
The night before Christmas; and in not one home was there any
preparation for to-morrow, Mary thought, unless one or two lawless ones
had broken bounds and contrived something, from a little remembrance for
somebody to a suet pudding. It was strange, she owned: no trees being
trimmed, no churches lighted for practice, and the shops closed as on
any other night. Only the post office had light--she went in to look in
her box. Affer was there at the telegraph window, and he accosted her.
"Little boy's comin' to-night, is he?" he said, as one of the sponsors
for that arrival.
"I'm on my way to the train now," Mary answered, and noted the Christmas
notice with its soiled and dog-eared list still hanging on the wall. "It
was a good move," she insisted to herself, as she went out into the
empty street again.
"You got a merry Christmas without no odds of the paper or me either,"
Affer called after her; but she did not answer save with her "Thank you,
Mr. Affer."
"Why do they all pretend to think it's so fine for me?" she wondered.
"To cheer me up, I guess," she thought grimly.
To-night they were all sharing the aloofness from the time, an aloofness
which she herself had known for years. All save Jenny. To Jenny's house,
in defiance of that dog-eared paper in the post office, Christmas had
come. Not a Christmas of "present trading," not a Christmas of things
at all; but _Christmas_. Unto them a child was born.
"Jenny's the only one in this town that's got a real Christmas," thought
Mary, on her way to meet her own little guest.
The Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange was dark, too, and
from its cave of window the gray Saint Nicholas looked out, bearing his
flag--and he to-night an idle, mummy thing of no significance. The Abel
Ames General Merchandise Emporium was closed, but involuntarily Mary
stopped before it. In its great plate-glass window a single candle
burned. She stood for a moment looking.
"Why, that's what they do, some places, to let the Christ-child in,"
Mary thought. "I wonder if Abel knows. How funny--for a store!"
Some one whom she did not know passed her and looked too.
"Kind o' nice," said the other.
"Real nice," Mary returned, and went on with a little glow.
Abel's candle, and the arc light shining like cold blue crystal before
the dark Town Hall, and the post-office light where the dog-eared list
hung and the telegraph key clicked out its pretence at hand touching
with all the world, these were the only lights the street showed--save
Capella, that went beside her and, as she looked, seemed almost to stand
above the town.
At Mis' Moran's house on the other side of the square, the children were
waiting for her--Bennet and Gussie and Tab and Pep and little Emily.
They ran before Mary in the road, all save little Emily, who walked
clasping Mary's hand.
"Aren't you staying up late, Emily?" Mary asked her.
"Yes," assented the child, contentedly.
"Won't you be sleepy?" Mary pursued.
"I was going to stay awake anyhow," she said; "I ain't goin' sleep all
night. We said so. We're goin' stay 'wake and see Santa Claus go by."
"Go by?" Mary repeated.
"Yes," the child explained; "you don't think that'll hurt, do you?" she
asked anxiously. "And then," she pursued, "if we don't see him, we'll
know he's dead everywheres else, too. An' then we're goin' bury him
to-morrow morning, up to Gussie's house."
At the station, no one was yet about. The telegraph instrument was
clicking there, too, signaling the world; a light showed in the office
behind a row of sickly geraniums; the wind came down through the cut and
across the tracks and swept the little platform. But the children
begging to stay outside, Mary stood in a corner by the telegraph
operator's bay window and looked across to the open meadows beyond the
tracks and up at the great star. The meadows, sloping to an horizon
hill, were even and white, as if an end of sky had been pulled down and
spread upon them. Utter peace was there, not the primeval peace that is
negation, but a silence that listened.
"'While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the
ground,...'" Mary thought and looked along the horizon hill. The time
needed an invocation from some one who watched, as many voices, through
many centuries, had made invocation on Christmas Eve. For a moment,
looking over the lonely white places where no one watched, as no
one--save only Jenny--watched in the town, Mary forgot the children....
The shoving and grating of baggage truck wheels recalled her. Just
beyond the bay window she saw little Emily lifted to the truck and the
four others follow, and the ten heels dangle in air.
"Now!" said Pep. And a chant arose:
"'Twas the night before Christmas when all
through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with
care
In the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would
be there...."
Upborne by one, now by another, now by all three voices, the verses went
on unto the end. And it was as if not only Tab and Pep and Bennet and
Gussie and little Emily were chanting, but all children who had ever
counted the days to Christmas and had found Christmas the one piece of
magic that is looked on with kindness by a grown-up world. The magic of
swimming holes, for example, is largely a forbidden magic; the magic of
loud noises, of fast motion, of living things in pockets, of far
journeys, of going off alone, of digging caves, of building fires, of
high places, of many closed doors, words, mechanisms, foods, ownerships,
manners, costumes, companions, and holidays are denied them. But in
Christmas their affinity for mystery is recognized, encouraged,
gratified, annually provided for. The little group on the baggage truck
chanted their watch over a dead body of Christmas, but its magic was
there, inviolate. The singsong verses had almost the dignity of lyric
expression, of the essence of familiarity with that which is unknown. As
if, because humanity had always recognized that the will to Christmas
was greater than it knew, these words had somehow been made to catch
and reproduce, for generations, some faint spirit of the midwinter
mystery.
The 'bus rattled up to the platform and Buff Miles leaped down and
blanketed his horses, talking to them as was his wont.
"So, holly and mistletoe,
So, holly and mistletoe,
So, holly, and mistletoe,
Over and over and over, oh...."
he was singing as he came round the corner of the station.
"It ain't Christmas yet," he observed defensively to Mary. "It ain't
forbid except for Christmas Day, is it?"
He went and bent over the children on the truck.
"Look alive as soon as you can do it," Mary heard him say to them, and
wondered.
She stood looking up the track. Across the still fields, lying empty
and ready for some presence, came flashing the point of flame that
streamed from the headlight of the train. The light shone out like a
signal flashed back to the star standing above the town.