At his gate in the street wall lined with snow-bowed lilacs and
mulberries, Ebenezer Rule waited in the dark for his two friends to come
back. He had found Kate Kerr in his kitchen methodically making a jar of
Christmas cookies. ("You've got to eat, if it is Christmas," she had
defended herself in a whisper.) And to her stupefaction he had
dispatched her to Mary Chavah's with her entire Christmas baking in a
basket.
"I don't believe they've got near enough for all the folks I see going,"
he explained it.
While he went within doors he had left the hobbyhorse in the snow, close
to the wall; and he came back there to wait. The street had emptied. By
now every one had gone to Mary Chavah's. Once he caught the gleam of
lanterns down the road and heard children's voices singing. For some
time he heard the singing, and after it had stopped he fancied that he
heard it. Startled, he looked up into the wide night lying serene above
the town, and not yet become vexed by the town's shadows and interrupted
by their lights. It was as if the singing came from up there. But the
night kept its way of looking steadily beyond him.
... It came to Ebenezer that the night had not always been so
unconscious of his presence. The one long ago, for example, when he had
slept beneath this wall and dreamed that he had a kingdom; those other
nights, when he had wandered abroad with his star glass. Then the night
used to be something else. It had seemed to meet him, to admit him. Now
he knew, and for a long time had known, that when he was abroad in the
night he was there, so to say, without its permission. As for men, he
could not tell when relation with them had changed, when he had begun to
think of them as among the externals; but he knew that now he ran along
the surface of them and let them go. He never met them as _Others_, as
belonging to countless equations of which he was one term, and they
playing that wonderful, near rôle of _Other_. Thus he had got along, as
if his own individuation were the only one that had ever occurred and as
if all the mass of mankind--and the Night and the Day--were
undifferentiated from some substance all inimical.
Then this vast egoism had heard itself expressed in the mention of
Bruce's baby--the third generation. But by the great sorcery wherewith
Nature has protected herself, this mammoth sense of self, when it
extends unto the next generations, becomes a keeper of the race.
Ebenezer had been touched, relaxed, disintegrated. Here was an interest
outside himself which was yet no external. Vast, level reaches lay about
that fact, and all long unexplored. But these were peopled. He saw them
peopled....
... As in the cheer and stir within the house where that night were
gathered his townsfolk, his neighbours, his "hands." He had thought that
their way of meeting him, if he chose to go among them, would matter
nothing. Abruptly now he saw that it would matter more than he could
bear. They were in there at Mary's, the rooms full of little families,
getting along as best they could, taking pride in their children,
looking ahead, looking ahead--_and they would not know that he
understood_. He could not have defined offhand what it was that he
understood. But it had, it seemed, something to do with Letty's account
book and Bruce's baby....
Gradually he let himself face what it was that he was wanting to do. And
when he faced that, he left the hobbyhorse where it was under the wall
and went into the street.
He took his place among the externals of the Winter night, himself
unconscious of them. The night, with all its content, a thing of
explicable fellowships, lay waiting patiently for those of its children
who knew its face. In the dark and under the snow the very elements of
earth and life were obscured, as in some clear wash correcting too
strong values. He moved along the village, and now his dominant
consciousness was the same consciousness in which that little village
lived. But he knew it only as the impulse that urged him on toward
Jenny's house. If he went to Jenny's, if he signified so that he wished
not to be cut off from her and Bruce and the baby, if he asked Bruce to
come back to the business, these meant a lifetime of modification to the
boy's ideals for that business, and modification to the lives of the
"hands" back there in Mary Chavah's house--and to something else....
"What else?" he asked himself.
Mechanically he looked up and saw the heavens crowded with bright
watchers. In that high field one star, brighter than the others, hung
over the little town. He found himself trying to see the stars as they
had looked to him years ago, when they and the night had seemed to mean
something else....
"What else?" he asked himself.
The time did not seem momentous. It was only very quiet. Nothing new was
there, nothing different. It had always been so. The night lay in a
sovereign consciousness of being more than just itself. "Do you think
that you are all just you and nothing else?" it was seen to be
compassionately asking.
"What else?" Ebenezer asked himself.
He did not face this yet. But in that hour which seemed pure essence,
with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward
Jenny's house.
* * * * *
Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where,
in the dark, the tree stood. He had wanted the door to be ajar "so the
things I think about can go back and forth," he had explained.
In the dining room she wrapped herself in the gray shawl and threw up
the two windows. New air swept in, cleansing, replacing, prevailing. Her
guests had left her early, as is the way in Old Trail Town. Then she had
had her first moments with the child alone. He had done the things that
she had not thought of his doing but had inevitably recognized: Had
delayed his bed-going, had magnified and repeated the offices of his
journey, had shown her the contents of his pockets, had repeatedly
mentioned by their first names his playmates in Idaho and shown surprise
when she asked him who they were. Mary stood now by the window conscious
of a wonderful thing: That it seemed as if he had been there always.
In the clean inrush of the air she was aware of a faint fragrance,
coming to her once and again. She looked down at her garden, lying
wrapped in white and veiled with black, like some secret being. Three
elements were slowly fashioning it, while the fourth, a soft fire within
her, answered them. The fragrance made it seem as if the turn of the
year were very near, as if its prophecy, evident once in the October
violets in her garden, were come again. But when she moved, she knew
that the fragrance came from within the room, from Ellen Bourne's
Christmas rose, blossoming on the table.... Above, her eye fell on the
picture that Jenny had brought to her on that day when she had all but
emptied the house, as if in readiness. Almost she understood now the
passionate expectation in that face, not unlike the expectation of those
who in her dream had kept saying "You."
[Illustration: "THE THREE MEN STEPPED INTO THE LAMPLIGHT"]
There was a movement in her garden and on the walk footsteps. The three
men stepped into the rectangle of lamplight--Abel, Ames and Simeon, who
had left the party a little before the others and, hurrying back with
the gifts that they planned, had met Ebenezer at his gate, getting home
from Jenny's house. In Abel's arms was something globed, like a little
world; in Simeon's, the tall, gray-gowned Saint Nicholas taken from the
Exchange window, the lettered sign absent, but the little flag still in
his hand; and Ebenezer was carrying the hobbyhorse. If at him the other
two had wondered somewhat, they had said nothing, in that fashion of
treating the essential which is as peculiar to certain simple, robust
souls as to other kinds of great souls.
"Has the boy gone to bed?" Abel asked without preface.
"Yes," Mary answered, "he has. I'm sorry."
"Never mind," Simeon whispered, "you can give him these in the morning."
Mary, her shawl half hiding her face, stooped to take what the three
lifted.
"They ain't presents, you know," Abel assured her positively. "They're
just--well, just to let him know."
Mary set the strange assortment on the floor of the dining room--the
things that were to be nothing in themselves, only just "to let him
know."
"Thank you for him," she said gently. "And thank you for me," she added.
Ebenezer fumbled for a moment at his beaver hat, and took it off. Then
the other two did so to their firm-fixed caps. And with an impulse that
came from no one could tell whom, the three spoke--the first time
hesitatingly, the next time together and confidently.
"Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas," they said.
Mary Chavah lifted her hand.
"Merry Christmas!" she cried.
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