between them, and then she left him. As he went down the path from the
church he heard behind him the shrill piping of the Sunday School,
singing the opening hymn, and he smiled at the sound, for it touched
forgotten stops in his memory. Gilsey, he reflected, was just about
getting up at this moment, after his Sunday morning loaf in bed, and
was probably swearing at the hot water tap as he shaved himself. Smith
and Stedman, maybe, were finishing breakfast at the club, and solemnly
debating the tremendous question of how they would kill the remainder
of the day. Mercer was getting ready the Sunday afternoon assignment
book in a newspaper office stale with the tobacco smoke of the night
before, and doubtless planning to get away early for a bridge game--his
Sunday afternoon recreation. How they would all sneer at Wallace if
they knew he was coming from church, and listening with wistful delight
to the drone of Sunday School behind him!
The following afternoon, when school was out, Wallace dragged his
toboggan to the hill, and joined once more in the sport. The slide
was still intact. The bully’s fangs had evidently been drawn. Miss
Woodford was there, with Albert. For an hour Wallace’s toboggan was
packed with shouting small boys, who treated him now like one of them,
an unconscious flattery which he found very pleasant. Then, as the sun
began to sink through a green sky into the tops of the hemlocks far
across the snowy fields, Wallace left his toboggan behind, for Joe to
take proud charge of, and walked home with the girl and Albert. The
shouts died away behind them. It was almost twilight in the village
street. As they came to Miss Woodford’s gate, Wallace saw a red lamp in
the window, glowing between the evergreens. He paused abruptly.
“I can’t tell you what a curious sensation that lighted window square
gives me, gleaming behind the trees over the snow,” he said. “But in
some strange way it takes me back to the days when I was no older
than Albert, and Christmas was a reality. Ever since I came to North
Topsville I’ve had a curious sensation of familiarity, though I was
never here before in my life. Just now, if my mother should be waiting
at the door, I’d not be surprised.”
“Your mother is dead?” the girl asked.
“And my father. I left New England many years ago, and I guess I’ve
been a man without a country ever since. Now I’m coming back home.”
It may be he spoke wistfully, for the girl did not reply for a moment,
and little Albert ran ahead with the toboggan.
“We New Englanders never quite forget, do we?” she finally said. “We
are like the Irish in that. I--I trust you will continue to feel at
home in North Topsville. We are surely New England here, especially in
our ratio of the sexes! I’m one of sixty-seven old maids in this small
village.”
Wallace looked at her, with her firm body in its white sweater, her
full-colored cheeks, her keen, dancing eyes, and suddenly laughed.
“Then that’s proof positive of Mr. Shaw’s ‘Man and Superman’ theory,”
he said, “and--well, some of you are merely indifferent.”
The girl darted a look at him. “No woman ever tells what she really
thinks of Mr. Shaw’s theory,” she replied, leading the way up the path.
Presently Wallace was trying to drink tea and reproduce the Woolworth
Tower in blocks at the same time, in a square, mahogany-furnished
room which appeared to have been lived in for a century and yet to be
freshly and cheerfully of today. He saw Miss Woodford for the first
time without hat or wraps. She had run upstairs and returned with
slippers on instead of high boots, and he noticed that her stockings
were of heavy wool. Somehow he was pleased at this common-sense
concession to the climate. Her hair was copious and rebellious.
Inside of the house, she looked riotously healthy, in odd contrast
to the women of New York. Her sister, evidently a recent widow, was
more subdued, though she, too, had a twinkle in her eyes, a palpable
inheritance from the white-haired woman who sat upright and energetic
at the tea table and astounded Wallace by saying, “Since my daughter
spoke of you I have read one of your stories in a magazine, and I
don’t like it very much.”
“Which one was it?” asked Wallace, looking up from the pile of blocks
in front of him on the rug. His eyes met the old lady’s, and she seemed
pleased at the challenge.
“It was about a man and a woman--all magazine stories are--who have all
kinds of emotions at a violin recital. It seemed rather turgid to me. I
call that form of affection a sublimated species of Dutch courage.”
Wallace joined in the laugh. “I guess you are right,” he said, “but
you must try to excuse me as a New Yorker. You see, we live in such a
restricted round of artificial pursuits and pleasures that we have to
substitute art for nature as a stimulant.”
“Speaking of stimulants, have some more tea,” said the old lady.
“Albert, pass the gentleman’s cup.”
“He ain’t got the tower did yet,” said the boy.
“Albert!”
Albert brought the cup.
Presently Albert’s mother took him off, protesting, to his supper, and
Wallace and the girl sat before the fire while the mother chatted on
an amazing variety of topics, evidently pleased at the chance of a new
listener, and asked innumerable questions about affairs of the hour,
which the man answered as best he could.
The girl came with him to the outer door.
“I like your mother,” he said.
“Most people do, who aren’t afraid of her,” she smiled.
As he drew on his gloves, she stood in the doorway not minding the
cold, and the last glimpse he had was of her face, rosy and smiling, in
the slit of golden light, her eyes alone telling him good night, while
the face of Albert was suddenly squeezed through between her skirts
and the door frame and his small voice piped, “I got a steam train you
ain’t saw!”
“You _haven’t seen_,” Wallace heard faintly, as the door closed.
Even the little shops in North Topsville were gay for Christmas.
Nearly all had small evergreens before the doors, and attempted window
displays. As Wallace walked back for supper, it occurred to him that
he ought to buy Albert a present. But there seemed to be nothing quite
satisfactory in the local market. It would be a good joke to write and
ask one of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association to select
it for him in New York. He smiled as he thought of Mercer’s remarks
when the request came. What was the name of that Fifth Avenue toy shop,
anyhow? Wallace searched his memory till the name came to him, and
wrote at once for a toy aeroplane such as he had seen in the windows,
the propeller operated by rubber bands. But he didn’t write to Mercer.
He wanted to be sure of the toy.
The next day it snowed, a soft, steady, dry fall, and after working
all the morning before his cheerful fire, the ideas coming with
unaccustomed fertility, Wallace set out for a tramp. He wondered if he
dared ask the girl to go with him, and was still debating the point
when he found himself on her porch. Yes, she would go; she loved to
tramp in the snow. In three minutes she reappeared, wrapped in white
woollens, and strode beside him down the path, while the wails of
Albert were heard at being left behind.
“Poor chap,” said Wallace, “it’s a great tragedy not to be allowed to
do what the big folks are doing. Perhaps I can make him a snow lady to
cheer him up when we get back. Where shall we walk?”
“How would you like to take a tramp to Christmas?” the girl asked.
“Have we time?” he smiled.
She didn’t answer, but set off up the road at a swinging pace.
“You see, the honor of the town is rather at stake,” she said
presently. “We can’t let you get away still a heathen. We’ve _got_ to
show you Christmas.”
“Will we meet Santa Claus?” he asked.
“Oh, no, not in the daytime, silly. But we may see the prints of his
reindeers’ hoofs.”
They turned up a side road after half a mile of brisk walking, passed
one or two farmhouses, and began to climb a hill. The snow, which had
been stinging their faces, was now abating. The wind had broken into
the northwest, and in that quarter a rift of blue sky appeared.
“Look,” cried the girl, “it is clearing! Oh, I’m going to show you
something beautiful!”
They now turned up a wood road, and began to make their way with
difficulty through unbroken snow, four inches of feathery new fall on
top, and beneath that the half-crusted old snow through which their
feet broke. Wallace found it hard work, and looked at his companion
solicitously. “Isn’t this too hard walking for you?” he asked.
“Are you getting tired?” she smiled. “We really should have brought
snowshoes, but you’ll have to go a considerable distance to fag me. I’m
used to it.”
“You are quite different from some women I’ve known in recent years,
that’s a fact,” said he. “You are so wonderfully healthy!”
“I’m disgustingly so,” she laughed. “Look! One of Santa’s reindeer!”
She was on her knees in the snow, examining a hoof print. “And there
are more!” she added. “See, he’s tramped around that sumach bush, and
nibbled off all the buds!”
“Are we getting near Christmas?” asked Wallace.
She rose, shook her skirt, and started on. “We are,” she cried, “and
here’s the sun to decorate the trees!”
Sure enough, as she spoke the sun came out, and instantly the woods
around them--a grove of young chestnuts and maples--became radiant
with frostwork on every twig, arching into groins of tracery overhead.
Wallace fairly gasped with delight, and the girl smiled into his face.
“Have you anything as nice as that in New York?” she said. “This is all
mine, too. I own this wood lot all myself.”
She hurried him on through the sunlit, elfin aisles of the frost
cathedral till suddenly the hard timber ended, and a grove of young
spruce and hemlock confronted them, with now and then a patriarchal old
pine lifting far above the lesser trees and holding out the dazzling
snow on its branches against the blue sky.
“Come in, come in,” the girl whispered, “Christmas is in here!”
Close behind her, he followed in among the evergreens. The branches
shook snow down upon them as they passed through till they were
powdered white. A few chickadees hopped, half invisible, among the
thick foliage. A moment later they stood in an open glade, where a few
dead goldenrod stalks stood up in lovely Japanese simplicity above the
white carpet, and all about them was a ring of perfect Christmas trees,
each loaded with snow on its lateral branches, dazzling snow against
the green in the afternoon sun. Above was the blue winter sky. Only the
chickadees’ song broke the perfect silence.
“This is where the Christmas trees live,” said the girl, softly. “Now,
do you believe?”
“I believe,” he answered. “And there is a present for me on every
branch.”
“What is that?”
He looked into her face. “Perhaps I can’t tell you now,” he answered.
“I shall have to take it home and open it. I’m not used to presents,
and I can’t guess from the feel of the bundle.”
“I hope it’s something nice,” she smiled.
“I’m sure of that,” said he, his eyes still on hers.
So they stood for an instant, their eyes meeting, and then her gaze
dropped.
They spoke more seriously as they tramped homeward.
“Your mother’s criticism of my story, it was just--I see that now,”
he said. “After all, to anyone who lives near woods like these, who
has children to care for, and neighbors’ troubles to adjust, and the
welfare of a community on his conscience, the life of some of us in
New York, between theatres and concerts and clubs and teas, must seem
rather--well, rather useless. I’ve thought sometimes--most of the time,
I fear--that life outside of New York was a pretty dull and deadening
thing, that I couldn’t be happy anywhere else. That’s the typical New
York view. Yet all the while these woods were here, these elfin aisles
of frost and twig--and--and you walking down them.”
“I know the New York view very well,” she answered, after the briefest
pause, in which his last personality seemed to hover between them till
she put it from her, not angrily, still less coquettishly, but rather
as an interruption to graver thought. “But if you lived here in North
Topsville long you would learn that there is something to be said for
New York, too. I should hate to live in New York all my days. I think I
should rise up like Samson and push over the walls if I were cooped up
in a flat. But you noticed how Mother just ate you up conversationally?
Well, that was because you came from New York, I mean because you had
touched all the currents of thought and activity just by being there
amid so many active people. We have to go down to New York once in a
while to restock our brains as well as our wardrobes. And you’ve no
idea how good the old street looks when we come back!”
“But here,” Wallace said, “you have neighbors, you have a community
life, you are of use to other people. I suppose one could be in town,
too, if he were big enough to realize the opportunities--to go out for
them. But the average man in a city isn’t big enough.”
“Of use to other people, yes,” she answered, eagerly. “That more than
anything else is at the bottom of what silly little philosophy of life
I, as a woman, am permitted to have. My friends in New York ask me, as
they are rushing me off to a concert or a theatre or a tea, what I find
to do with myself in the country all winter. I don’t tell them--what’s
the use? But there’s so much to do! So much I’m not fitted to do,
though I try. You know Joe, who helped you build the slide--the merry,
red-haired little chap? You must like Joe! Joe’s father drinks. How are
we going to keep Joe from drinking? We mustn’t let him go the same way,
must we? That’s just one of a hundred problems--all too hard for me.
Sometimes I come out here to these woods and just ask and ask for help!”
Wallace looked into her flushed, eager face, lovely in its
transfiguration of earnestness, and something in his own soul rose
up and choked him. He saw his life as utter selfishness, and he was
ashamed, ashamed as he had never been before.
“I--I--came here looking for Christmas,” he said slowly, “but I guess
it’s something different from what I thought. I guess I was just a
sentimental searcher after my lost childhood. Christmas is--is service,
isn’t it?”
The girl looked at him, and suddenly put out her hand. He took it
in his. “Yes, oh yes!” she answered. “It is service and the joy of
service. It is just being glad of the chance! Oh, please always believe
that!”
She gave his hand an eager pressure, while her face glowed to his.
“I promise,” he answered.
Then her fingers slipped away, and they tramped on in silence, deep
in their thoughts. The woods seemed more than ever to him a frost
cathedral.
Out on the open road, in the freedom of clear walking, they swung along
at a faster pace, and laughter returned. They entered her house for
tea, and once more Wallace saw her rebellious hair about her face, and
once more the little hands of Albert grasped his, dragging him to see
his toys, and sent a thrill to his heart, and once more he sat opposite
to the girl in the firelight and talked, with the mother leading the
conversation. He felt as if he were once more almost a part of a real
family, as he had not been for many, many years. It was with a pang
that he rose to go. The girl shook hands with him in the door. He could
only say “Thank you,” awkwardly, and went to his hotel in a daze, like
a man walking in new worlds not yet realized.
The next morning he wrote to New York for a Boy Scout manual, and for
more of his clothes and possessions. At dinner a message came from the
girl asking him to join in a trip to the woods after a Christmas tree,
and of course he went. At the Woodford house he found a big lumber
sledge waiting, with Albert already dancing up and down beside the
driver, and Joe, with three other boys, dangling their legs behind.
The girl soon joined them, and they went jingling up the street, the
youngsters chattering, and yelling at their companions on the walk.
When they reached the grove of spruce and hemlock, everybody sprang
from the sledge and began to prospect for trees.
“Don’t let them cut any from the Christmas ring,” whispered Wallace.
“I--I shouldn’t want that ring altered. Please!”
The girl looked at him, and colored a little, nodding an affirmation.
“You haven’t told me what the present was,” she whispered.
“I will--some day,” he answered. “I can’t quite make it out myself yet.”
For the next five minutes there was much scampering about and
excitement and shouting. But presently each boy selected a tree, and
Wallace, leading Albert by the hand, up to his tiny knees in snow,
found a tree which just suited that young person, and then the ax went
the round, and the sledge was loaded with the fragrant evergreens.
On the homeward trip, Wallace was aware of the old Christmas tingle in
his veins, for beside him the boys chattered of their holiday hopes,
of sleds and books and tools and toys long desired; behind him was the
pile of fragrant spruce; all about him was the white world and the
cold air and the jingle of sleighbells. But he was aware of something
else--strange and new, of which his memory had no record. He felt an
odd, new tenderness toward these children; their chatter was music to
him, yes, to him who lived between his club and his apartment and never
saw a child from one month to the next! He put an arm about Albert to
hold him on the sledge, and longed suddenly to press the little body
hard against his side. He was aware, too, of the girl--above all of the
girl; but not, somehow, apart from these other little lives and this
new tenderness for childhood, but rather as the crown and completion of
his mood. He thought of it first as his mood, and then mentally altered
the word. No, it was not a mood. It was a new, spiritual attitude,
surely. It was his present on the Christmas trees, the present _she_
had given him. He longed to tell her of it. He looked at her, over the
laughing, eager faces of the boys, and her eyes smiled back. He was too
happy to speak. Perhaps she knew that, for she did not speak, either.
When he took her hand to help her alight, it seemed to him as if they
were older friends than when the ride began. An hour later, in the
twilight dimness of her hall, she said to him:
“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Mother wants you to dine with us--early,
because of Albert--and maybe you’ll help us set up the tree and
decorate it. We’ll try to be as Christmasy as we can for you.”
“Tomorrow I’ll--I’ll tell you what the present was,” he answered. “Ah,
you’ve shown me Christmas already. I can’t explain--perhaps I shouldn’t
say anything--but somehow I have felt today as if I had known you a
long time, as if I had known you always, but something had separated
us.” He laughed a little, embarrassed how to continue, for she was
silent, her face averted. “I--guess that’s a pretty common way for a
man to feel when he meets somebody who comes into his life with a big,
glad, upsetting rush,” he went on. Then he finished lamely, “Rosetti
has a poem about it, I recall.”
There was a long silence. In the house behind Wallace could hear
Albert’s voice, chattering excitedly to his mother as he ate his
supper. In the sitting room he could hear the old lady poking the fire
energetically--she did everything energetically. A big grandfather’s
clock on the stair landing ticked in time to his heart throbs--a
curious, irrelevant fact which his mind laid hold of as the mind will
in such tense moments. Finally the girl spoke, her voice low, but her
eyes looking frankly up into his.
“What you have just said seems to connect me, a little more personally
than I’m afraid I deserve, with Christmas,” she answered. “Isn’t it
really little Albert you’ve known so long, not I?”
“It is you--Auntie Nora,” he whispered back. “Oh, I can’t tell you
now, but I will--I will! Why were all the intervening years?”
“We are taught there is a reason for everything,” she smiled, her eyes
veiled as a woman can veil her eyes when she chooses. But her color was
high, nor did she move away from him. In the half dusk of the hall they
were close together to see each other’s faces, and to hear each other’s
low-spoken words. Her presence thrilled him. “Good night,” he suddenly
whispered, taking her hand and holding it hard in his. “I shall find
Christmas tomorrow!”
“I--I hope so,” she whispered back.
Her smile had gone, and the veil from her eyes. They seemed suddenly
the eyes of all good women he was looking into. They gazed into his
and told him in some mysterious way that a bond existed between him
and her, that she desired his happiness, that she desired it to be the
happiness which comes from the highest living. Her hand was warm in
his. She did not withdraw it, but held his fingers firmly, while her
eyes were lifted telling him these things the tongue cannot utter. His
own eyes filled with strange tears, of happiness and humbleness, and he
left her in silence.
At his hotel room he found the big parcel containing Albert’s
aeroplane, and also, in his mail, a final threat from the other members
of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association. With a smile, he
put the letter in his pocket, and, unpacking the aeroplane, consumed
the half hour before dinner putting it together. When it was assembled,
he placed it on his bed, contemplated it in the light of Albert’s
emotions--and found it good.
It was there on the bed when he came up from dinner--a child’s toy in
his room, a warming reminder, a symbol. He drew a picture and wrote
a poem to go with it, and then, seeing the moonlight on the village
roofs, he went out into the street, his shoes squeaking on the packed
snow in the zero weather, and swung up the road. In the house behind
the evergreens the sitting-room window squares glowed warmly. Inside,
by the fire or the lamp, she was sitting. Wallace two weeks before
would have laughed down the suggestion that he could be such a banal
idiot as to haunt the roadway before a woman’s house, thrilled by
the thought that she was inside. Yet here he was, in the moonlight,
gazing at the red window squares beyond the snowy evergreens, all his
conscious being flooded with the memory of the girl within and the
sense of home and hearth and loved ones.
Home and hearth--those words began to chime in his brain. Losing them,
one lost Christmas. Christmas was service, and the joy and celebration
of service, she had said. But were not they, the home and hearth, at
the beginning and the end of service? What was all the industrial
struggle of the world for at the bottom but to gain them? What was
liberty but the opportunity to enjoy them? What generous or holy
impulse but owed its birth to them, where even the race is born? The
light went out behind the evergreens, and a moment later reappeared
in the second story. He saw a figure come to the window, look for a
second, and then draw down the shade. It was she! That was her chamber!
Foolishly, happily, tenderly, Wallace lifted his face toward it and
shaped his lips into a kiss.
As he went back to the hotel his life seemed as clear before him as the
shadows of the tree trunks cast by the moonlight on the snow.
Late the next afternoon, when he arrived at the house behind the
evergreens, a large, mysterious parcel under his arm, Albert greeted
him in the hall with shouts of delight, demanding to know if the parcel
was for him.
“For you? What an idea!” said Wallace. “I met Santa Claus just now
flying over the church, and he dropped this down to me, telling me to
give it to the best boy in North Topsville. You don’t get it unless you
can prove you’re the best boy. My! I had a hard time catching it, for
Santa was up nearly as high as the top of the steeple when he dropped
it. Lucky I’m a ball player!”
“I’m the bestest boy,” said Albert. “My mother said so yesterday to
Mrs. Perkins, ’cause I heard her.”
“What does Auntie Nora say? The law requires two witnesses, you know.”
“Auntie Nora says it will depend on how Albert behaves tonight,” said a
voice on the landing.
Wallace looked up. The girl he had seen only in rough short skirt and
outing woollens, with rebellious hair, was descending toward him in
silks, a jeweled pendant at her bare throat, her shoulders gleaming.
She was very beautiful, and the hand she extended toward him might, he
thought, have been the hand of a princess which he should stoop and
kiss.
“Hi, Auntie Nora’s all dressed up!” cried Albert. “Why’d you all dress
up, Auntie?”
The princess blushed and laughed, and said, “Now Auntie Nora thinks
you’re _not_ the best boy in town, because good boys don’t make
personal remarks.”
“But I think you’re very beautiful,” said Albert, suddenly throwing his
arms about her. “Isn’t she, Mr. Miller?”
“She is, indeed, Albert, she is the loveliest lady in the world!”
Wallace answered, his voice intense, his eyes looking over Albert,
fascinated.
The girl hid her face on Albert’s shoulder, while that young person
added the further comment, “Why, your cheek’s orful hot, Auntie.”
“Now you’re the _worst_ boy in town,” she said, “and you won’t get
Santa’s box, for certain!”