IT is the custom in America to open the theatres on Christmas day.
The doors of the Baltimore house could not have been opened in more
wretched weather. The streets were impassable, except for carriages,
or for pedestrians in “Arctic rubbers,” or on stilts. The snow was
melting everywhere. Nothing had been done to clear the sidewalks. They
were full of treacherous puddles, or equally treacherous snow-drifts.
The Turks blow horns at certain periods of the year, to frighten
away evil spirits. I know of no explanation for the blowing of horns
at Baltimore; but the boys indulge themselves in this exercise to
a bewildering extent at Christmas. Carol-singing is evidently not a
custom there, nor “waits.” I heard a boy shouting at the top of his
voice the refrain of a popular ditty:—
“In the morning, in the morning,
When Gabriel blows his trumpet,
In the morning.”
But I conclude that he had only adapted these modern words to what was
evidently an old custom at Baltimore; for he blew his horn vigorously
at the end of the refrain, as if competing for supremacy with Gabriel
himself.
“You are right; it does not seem like Christmas,” said Irving, as we
sat down to supper,—close upon midnight,—a section of that same party
which, a year previously, had gathered about the round table in the
host’s Beefsteak Club room at the Lyceum Theatre.
“It seems so strange,” said Ellen Terry, “to play on Christmas Day;
that, to me, makes the time wholly unlike Christmas. On the other hand,
there is the snow, and we shall have an English Christmas pudding,—I
brought it from home, and my mother made it.”
“Well done; bless her heart!” said Irving; “but I have played before
on Christmas Day. They open the theatres in Scotland on Christmas Day.
They don’t pay much attention, I am told, to church festivals in Boston
and New England; but one would have expected it in the South, where
they are observing the social character of Christmas, I learn, more
and more every year; and not alone to the snow, but to that fact, I
am told, we are to attribute the small houses we had last night and
to-night.”
“Small for America and for us,” chimed in Loveday; “but what we should,
after our experience, call bad business here would be very good in
England.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Irving; “but here’s holly and
mistletoe,—where did they come from?”
He was looking at a very English decoration that swung from the
chandelier.
“From London, with the pudding,” said Miss Terry.
The colored attendants took great interest in our celebration of the
festival. If they could have put their thoughts into words they would
probably have expressed surprise that artists of whom they had heard so
much could entertain each other in so simple a fashion.
When the pudding came on the table it was not lighted.
“Who has had charge of this affair?” Irving asked, looking slyly at
everybody but Stoker.
“I have,” said the usual delinquent.
“That accounts for it,” said Irving. “Who ever heard of a Christmas
pudding without a blaze, except, perhaps, in Ireland?”
“Oh, we’ll soon light it up!” said Stoker. “Waiter, bring some brandy!”
Presently the pudding flamed up, to the delight of the African
gentlemen who served it.
“I fear there is no sauce,” said one of the ladies.
“No sauce! Christmas pudding and no sauce!” I exclaimed. “Here’s stage
management!”
“Sauce!” said Stoker,—“to plum pudding?”
“Yes, always in England,” said Loveday.
This kind of mild banter was checked by Irving filling his glass with
champagne, and observing, “After the experience of last year, of course
we ought not to have entrusted Stoker with the pudding. However, let us
make the best of it. It seems a very good pudding, after all. I want
you all to fill your glasses. Let us wish each other in the old way,
‘A merry Christmas and A happy New Year,’ and ‘God bless our absent
friends!’”
Some of us gulped the wine a little spasmodically, and some of us found
it hard to keep back our tears. Who can pledge that familiar toast,
and not think of the empty chairs that seem so very, very empty at
Christmas!
When the women and my girls had been escorted to their carriages, and
sent home to their hotel, with flowers and bon-bons on their laps,
we three men of the little party sat round the fire and talked of
old times. Irving had ordered the biggest logs the hotel’s wood-yard
afforded to be heaped into the grate. The fire cracked and spluttered
and blazed, and had in the lower bars of the grate a solid, steady glow
of white ash that was truly English; and I think we each looked into
it for a time, busy with our own individual thoughts and reflections.
Presently, under the more cheerful influences of the season, we talked
of many things, and finally drifted into “shop.” The chief subject was
started by Irving himself, and it dealt with the novel treatment of
the next Shakespeare play which he intends to produce at the Lyceum.
Irving looked into the fire and saw it there, scene by scene, act by
act. As he saw it, he described it.
It was in the glamour of his rosiest pictures that I said good-night,
to have the witchery of the fire-light dispelled by the outer
bitterness of the weather, and the lonely, desolate appearance of the
city. The streets were now as hard as they had been soft; the pools
were ice, the snow adamant; and icicles hung down from the eaves of
every house. The roadways glistened in the lamp-light. Not a soul was
abroad. It might have been a city of the dead. A strain of Christmas
music would have redeemed the situation. Even a London “waits” band at
its worst, such as one awakens to with a growl on cold nights at home,
would have been a God-send. Not a sound; not a footstep; no distant
jangle of car-bells; not even a policeman; only the winter night
itself, with a few chilly-looking stars above, and the cold, hard, icy
streets below.