House before dark, and I’ll never forget the thing we saw. Standing in
the door of the little house was the woman we’d spoke with in the
afternoon, and she was wearing the same ex-blue alpaca. But now she’d
been and got out from somewheres and put on a white straw hat, with
little pink roses all around it. And like lightning I sensed that she’d
watched for us to come back and had gone and got the hat out and put it
on, so’s to let us know she had that one decent thing to wear.
“Jem,” I says, “stop.”
I donno rightly why, but I clambered down out of the rig, and I says to
the woman: “Let me come in a minute--can I? I want to talk to you
about--about some sewing,” says I, that’s sewed every rag I’ve had on my
back most ever since I was clothed in any. But all of a sudden, her
getting out that hat made me feel I just had to get up close to her,
like you will.
But when I stepped inside, I forgot all about the sewing.
“My land, my dear,” I says, or it might have been, “My dear, my land,” I
was that taken-back and upset, “you’d ought to have this ceiling
mended.”
For the plaster had fell off full half of it and the roof leaked; and
there wasn’t very much of any furniture, to clap the climax.
“The City won’t do anything,” says she. “They’re going to tear it down.
And the rent ain’t much--so I want to stay.”
“Well,” says I, “I’m going to bring you out some napkins to hem next
week--can I?”--me having bought new before then so’s to have some work
for Missionary Society, so why not now? And her face lit up that same
way from inside.
When I’d got back in the rig, and we’d drove a little way by, I spoke to
the rest about her going and putting on the hat. Some of ’em had sensed
it, and some of ’em hadn’t--like some will and some won’t sense every
created thing. And when we all did get a-hold of it--well, I can’t
hardly tell you what it done. But there was something there in the rig
with us that hadn’t been there before, and that come with a rush now,
and that done a thing to us all alike. I can’t rightly say what it was,
or what it done; but I guess Mis’ Puppy come as near it as anybody:
“Oh, ladies,” she says, kind of hushed, “don’t that seem like--well,
don’t it make you feel--well, I donno, but ain’t it just....”
She kind of petered off, and it was Mis’ Pettibone, her enemy, that
answered.
“Don’t it, Mis’ Puppy?” she says, “_Don’t_ it?” And we all felt the same
way. Or similar. And we never said a word, but we told each other good
night, I noticed, about three times apiece, all around. And out of the
fulness of the lump in my throat, I says:
“Ladies! I invite the Go-lightly club to meet with me to-morrow
afternoon. Don’t bring anything but sandwiches and your plates and
spoons. I’ll open the sauce and make the tea and whip up some drop
sponge cakes. And meantime, let’s us get together everything we can for
her.”
And though hardly anybody in the village ever goes to anything two days
in succession, they all said they’d come.
By the time they got there next day we had carpet to sew out of some of
our attics, and some new sheets to make, and some white muslin curtains
out of Mis’ Puppy’s back room. And I explained to them that we couldn’t
rightly put it to vote whether we should furnish up the Toll Gate House,
because we didn’t have any president to put the motion, so the only way
was to go ahead anyhow and do it; which we done; and which, if not
parli-mental, was more than any mental, because it was out of our
hearts.
Right while we was in the midst of things, in come my roomer, Mr.
Dombledon. He’d come in the back door, as usual, and plumped into the
sitting-room before he saw we were there. He’d had Donnie with him that
day, because I had to be out most of the forenoon, and I called to them
to stop, because I wanted the ladies should see the little fellow.
Donnie shook hands with us, all around, like a little general, and then:
“What’s these?” says he, with his hands on the curtains in my lap. “A
nighty for me?”
“No, lambin’,” says I. “It’s curtains for a lady.”
“Are you that lady?” he says.
“No, lambin’,” says I. “A lady that ain’t got any curtains.”
But this he seemed to think was awful funny, and he laughed out--a
little boy’s laugh, and kep’ it up.
“Ladies always has curtains,” says he, superior.
“I donno,” says I. “I saw one yesterday that didn’t even have a carpet.”
“Where?” asks Mr. Dombledon.
It kind of surprised me to hear him speak up--of course I’d introduced
him all around, same as you do roomers and even agents in a little town,
where you behave in general more as if folks were folks than you do in
the City where they ain’t so much folks as lawyers, ladies, milkmen,
ministers, and so on. But yet I hadn’t really expected Mr. Dombledon to
volunteer.
“Down on the Tote road,” I says, “the old Toll Gate House. You ain’t
familiar with it, I guess.”
“Is this _hers_ curtains?” asks Donnie. “And can I have some pink
peaches sauce like in the kitchen?”
“They’s _hers_ curtains,” says I, “and if you’d just as soon make it
plums, you shall have all of them in the kitchen that’s good for you.”
And off he went outdoors making up a song about pink plums.
All of a sudden his father spoke up again.
“Do--do you need any more help?” he says.
“Sure we do,” says I.
“Well,” he says, gentling with the words careful, “I’m kind of
sure-moved with a needle.”
“Then,” says I, “mebbe you’ll needle this carpet seam that’s pulling my
fingers off in pairs. We’d be grateful,” says I, ready.
So down he sat and begun to sew, and I never see handier. He whipped up
the seam as nice and flat as a roller machine. And things was going
along as fine as salt and as smooth as soap when Mis’ Puppy picked up
from the pile of things a red cotton table-cover.
“Well,” she says, “I donno where we solicited this from, but whoever
give it shows their bringing up. Holes. And not only holes, but ink. And
not only so, but look there where their lamp set. Would you think
anybody of a donatin’ mind would donate such a thing as this?”
And Mis’ Pettibone spoke up sour and acid and bitter in one:
“I give that table-spread, Mis’ Puppy,” says she. “And it come off our
dining-room table. We don’t throw things away to our house before the
new is wore off. Anything more to say?”
“A grea’ deal,” says Mis’ Puppy, unflabbergasted, “but I’m too much of a
lady to say it.”
“A lady ...” says Mis’ Pettibone, and done a little mock-at-her laugh.
Quick as a flash, and before anybody could say a word more, up hopped
Mr. Dombledon and got out of the room. I followed him out on the side
porch, thinking he was took sick; and there he stood, staring off acrost
my wood lot.
“What is it, Mr. Dombledon?” I says.
“Don’t you mind me,” he says, “I got hit in a sore spot. I--guess I’ll
be stayin’ out here a little while.”
Pretty soon he went out and sat on the wood pile, and I took some supper
out to him on a pie-tin, and I told him then that we wanted to have
Donnie to the table with us.
He looked up at me kind of suffering.
“I wouldn’t want to refuse you anything,” he says, “but--will they say
any more things like that?”
Right with the sweep of my wondering at him, that I’d never heard a man
speak like him before, come a sweep of shame and of grieving and of
being kind of mad, too.
“No, sir,” says I. “We won’t have any more of that. What’s the good o’
being hostess if you can’t turn your guests out of the house?”
I went back into the house, and marched into the sitting-room. I donno
what I was going to say, but I never had to say it. For there was Mis’
Puppy, wiping her eyes on the red table-cover she’d scorned, and she was
sitting on the arm of Mis’ Pettibone’s chair.
“Them things hadn’t ought to be said, ladies,” says she, as well as she
could. “I can’t take back what I said about the table-cover, being it’s
what I think. But I wish I’d kep’ my mouth shut, and I don’t care who
knows it.”
I thought then, and I still think, it was one of the honestest and
sweepingest apologies I ever heard.
And all at once everybody kind of got up and folded their work, and
patted somebody on the elbow; and I see we was feeling a good deal the
way we had in the rig the night before; and it come to me, kind of big
and dim, that with the job we was doing, we couldn’t possibly nip out
at one another, like we would in just regular society. And all I done
was to sing out, “Your supper’s ready and the toast’s on the table.” And
we all went out, lion and lamb, and helped to set Donnie up on my
ironing-stool for a high chair. And it made an awful pleasant few
minutes.
We met three afternoons all together to sew for the Toll Gate House. And
when we begun to plan to take the things to her, and get the roof
mended, we realized we didn’t know her name.
“Ain’t that kind of nice?” says Mis’ Pettibone, dreamy. “And here we’re
just as interested in her as if her father’d been our butcher, or
something that’d make a real tie.”
“How shall we give these things to her?” says Mis’ Puppy. “Don’t let’s
us let it be nasty, same as charity is.”
And it was Mis’ Lockmeyer, her of all the folks under the canopy, that
set forward on the edge of her chair and thought of the thing to do.
“Ladies,” she says, “there’s one more pair of curtains to hem. Why don’t
we get her to one of our houses to hem ’em, and make her spend the day?
And get her roof fixed and her ceiling mended and this truck in, and let
it all be there when she gets home?”
“That’s what we _will_ do,” says we, with one set of common eyebrows
expressing our intention.
We decided that I’d be the one to ask her down, being I was the one that
first went in her house, and similar. She said she’d come ready enough,
and bring the little girl; and it made it real convenient, because Mr.
Dombledon had gone off on one of his two-days tramps and taken Donnie
with him. And the living minute I’d started her in sewing on the things
we’d saved for her to sew, and set the little girl to playing with some
of the things I’d fixed up for Donnie, I was out of the house and making
for the Toll Gate.
Land, land, the things we’d found we could spare and that we’d piled in
that house--stuff that we hadn’t known we had and that we couldn’t miss
if we’d tried, but had hung on to sole and only because we were deformed
into economizing that way. Honestly, I believe more folks economizes by
keeping old truck around than is extravagant by throwing new stuff away.
I don’t stand up for either, but I well know which has the most germs
in. What we’d sent we’d cleaned thorough. And it was clean as wax
there--but the roof was being mended and the ceiling was being fixed and
carpets were going down. And when we got done with it, I tell you that
little house looked as cozy as a Pullman car--and I don’t know anything
whatever that looks cozier after you’ve set up in the day coach all
night. And lions and lambs laying down together on swords and
plow-shares were nothing to the way we worked together all day long. We
had to jump to keep out of the way of being “been-nice” to so’s to get a
chance to be nice ourselves. I liked to be there. I like to think about
it since.
At five o’clock, old Mis’ Lockmeyer, dead-tuckered, was standing in the
door with a corner of her apron caught up in the band, when Jem drove me
away.
“Leave her come out any time now,” she says, “we’re ready for her. Mebbe
she’ll be mad but, land--even if she is, I can’t be sorry we done it.
It’s been as enjoyable,” she says, “as anything I’ve ever done.”
I looked back at her, and at all the other women back of her and in the
windows, and at Mis’ Pettibone and Mis’ Puppy leaning on the same sill,
and I nodded; and Mis’ Puppy--well, it was faint and ladylike, but just
the same the look that we give each other was far, far more than a
squint, and it was bordering on, and right up to, a regular wink.
When I come in sight of my house I was so busy thinking how she’d like
hers that I didn’t see for a minute what my front yard had in it. And
when I did see, my heart kind of went _plap!_--but a pleasant plap. My
front yard looked so exactly the way I’d used to dream of it looking,
and it never had. It was little and neat and green, with flowers and a
white door-step as usual, but out in front was a little girl, with my
clothes-rope doubled up for lines, and she was driving round and round
the pansy bed a little boy. Just before I got to the gate, and before
they saw me, they dropped the rope and went off around the house hand in
hand, like they’d known each other all their days.
“I wish everybody was like that,” thinks I, and went in my front door
and through to the dining-room.
And there, sitting on my couch with their arms around each other, was
the Toll Gate House lady and my roomer, Mr. Dombledon.
“Well,” says I. “Sudden--but real friendly!”
I see I had to say something, for they didn’t seem real capable of it.
And besides, I’d begun to suspicion, deep in the part of the heart that
ain’t never surprised at love anywheres.
Mr. Dombledon come over to me--and now his eyes were like the
sitting-room with all the curtains up.
“Oh, ma’am!” he says, “how did you know? How did you find out?”
“Know?” I says. “I know less all the time. And I ain’t found out yet.
I’m a-waiting for you to tell me.”
“We’re each other’s wife and husband,” says he, neat but shy.
They told me as well as they could, now together, now separate, now both
keeping still. I made it out more by means of the air than by means of
words, anyhow. But this thing that he said came home to me then, and
it’s never left me since:
“Nothin’ come between us,” he says. “No great trouble or sorrow or like
that, same as some. It was just every day that wore us out. We got to
snappin’ and snarlin’--like you do. We done it at everything--whenever
either of us opened our heads, the other one took ’em up on it. We done
it because we was tired. And we done it because we didn’t have much to
do with--nor no real home. And we done it for no reason too, I guess ...
an’ that come to be the oftenest of all. It got hold of us. That was
what ailed me that day at your meeting--I’d always run from it now same
as I would from the pest. It _is_ the pest.... Well, finally I went off
with Donnie and left Pearl with her. Then when I found out she’d come
here, I come here too, a-purpose. But I couldn’t go and face her, even
then. And it’s been six months. And now we both know.”
I stood there looking at those two little people, shabby and
or’nary-seeming; and I could have said something right past the lump in
my throat if only I could of thought how to put it. But I couldn’t--like
you can’t. Only--I knew.
“Where is he?” I heard her saying. “Where is he?”
I knew who she meant, and I went and got him. He come running in with
his swing-board on him for a breast-plate. And his mother never said a
word--she just gathered him up, swing-board and all, and kissed him at
the back of his neck, there in the hollow that had been a-waiting for
her.
“She made me cookies wiv buttins on!” he give out, for my biography. And
it was enough for me.
Mr. Dombledon had his little girl’s hands in his, swinging her arms back
and forth, and never saying a word.
Pretty soon I sent ’em off down the road, Donnie and Pearl ahead, they
two behind, carrying my ex-roomer’s things. And I knew how, at the Toll
Gate House, everything was warm and bright and furnished and
_suppered_, waiting for them. And life was nice.
I went and stood out on my porch, looking off acrost my wood lot,
thinking. I was thinking about the two of them, and about us women. And
I knew I’d been showed the little bit of an edge to something that’s so
small it don’t seem like anything, and so sordid we won’t any of us let
on it comes near us, and so big it reaches all over the world.
HUMAN
Pretty soon the new-old Christmas will be here. I donno but it’s here
now. Here in the village we’ve give out time and again that our
Christmas isn’t going to be just trading (not many of us can call it
“shopping” yet without stopping to think, any more than we can say
“maid” for hired girl, real easy) and just an exchange of useless gifts.
So in the “new” way, little by little the old Christmas is being
uncovered from under the store-keepers’ Christmas. Till at last we shall
have the Christmas of the child in the manger and not of the three
kings.
And then we’re going to look back on the romance that Christmas had
through the long time when meanings have measured themselves commercial.
Just as we look back now on the romance of chivalry. And we’ll remember
all the kindness and the humor of the time that’ll be outgrown--even
though we wouldn’t have the time come back when we looked for Christmas
in things--things--things ... and sometimes found it there.
The week before Christmas, the Friendship Village post-office, near
closing, is regular Bedlam. We all stand in line, with our presents done
up, while the man at the window weighs everybody else’s, and we almost
drop in our tracks. And our manners, times like this, is that we never
get out of our place for no one. Not for no one! Only--once we did.
Two nights before Christmas that year I got my next-to-the-last three
packages ready and stepped into the post-office with ’em about half-past
seven. And at the post-office door I met Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame
Bliss. She had a work-bag and a shopping-bag and a suit-case, all of ’em
bulging full.
“My land!” I says, “you ain’t going to mail all them?”
“I am, too,” she says, “and I’m that thankful I’m through, and my back
aches that hard, I could cry. Twenty-one,” she says, grim, “twenty-one
presents I’ve got made out of thought and elbow work, and mighty little
money, all ready to mail on time. Now,” says she, “I can breathe.”
“Kin I carry your satchel, Mis’ Holcomb?” says somebody.
We looked down, and there’s little Stubby Mosher, that’s seven, and not
much else to say about him. He ain’t no father, nor not much of any
brother, except a no-account one in the city; and his mother has just
been sent to the Wooster Hospital by the Cemetery Improvement Sodality
that is extending our work to include the sick. We’d persuaded her to go
there by Stubby’s brother promising to send him to spend Christmas with
her. And we were all feeling real tender toward Stubby, because we’d
just heard that week that she wasn’t going to get well.
“Well, Stubby,” says Mis’ Holcomb, kind, “yes, I’ll be obliged for a
lift, if not a lug. You well?” she asks.
“Yes’m,” says Stubby, acting green, like a boy will when you ask after
his health.
He picked up her suit-case and moved over toward the line. It was an
awful long line that night, that reached ’way around past the public
desk. In ahead of us was ’most everybody we knew--Abigail Arnold and
Mis’ Merriman and Libby Liberty and old rich Mis’ Wiswell with a bag of
packages looking like they might be jewelry, every one. And every one of
them was talking as hard as they could about the Christmas things they
couldn’t get done.
“Might as well settle down for a good visit while we’re waiting,” I says
to Mis’ Holcomb, and she made her eyebrows sympathize.
No sooner was we stood up, neat and in line, than in come three folks
that was total strangers to me and to the village as well. One was a
young girl around twenty, with eyes kind of laughing _at_ everything,
dressed in blue, with ermine on her hat and an ermine muff as big as one
of my spare-room pillows, and three big fresh pink roses on her coat.
And one was a youngish fellow, some older than her, in a gray cap, and
having no use of his eyes--being they were kept right close on the lady
in blue. And the other, I judged, was her father--a nice, jolly, private
Santa Claus, in a fur-lined coat. They were in a tearing hurry to get to
the general-delivery window, but when they saw the line, and how there
was only one window for mail and stamps and all, they fell in behind us,
as nice as we was ourselves.
“Let me take you out and you wait in the car, Alison,” says the youngish
man, anxious.
“Hadn’t you better, dear?” says her father, careful.
“Why, but I love this!” she says. “Isn’t it _quaint_?” And she laughed
again.
Now, I hate that word _quaint_. So does Mis’ Holcomb. It always sounds
to us like last year’s styles. So though her and I had been looking at
the three strangers--that we saw were merely passing through in an
automobile, like the whole country seems to--with some interest, we both
turned our backs and went on visiting and listening to the rest.
“I’ve got three more to get presents for,” says Mis’ Merriman in that
before-Christmas conversation that everybody takes a hand at, “and what
to get them I do _not_ know. Don’t you ever get up a stump about
presents?”
“Stump!” says Libby Liberty, “I live on a stump from the time I start
till I stick on the last stamp.”
“I’ve got two more on my list,” Mis’ Wiswell says, worried, “and it
don’t seem as if I could take another stitch nor buy another spoon,
hat-pin _or_ paper-knife. But I know they’ll send me something, both of
them.”
I stood looking at us, tired to death with what we’d been a-making, but
sending ’em off with a real lot of love and satisfaction wrapped up in
’em, too. And I thought how we covered up Christmas so deep with work
that we hardly ever had time to get at the real Christmas down
underneath all the stitches. And yet, there we were, having dropped
everything else that we were doing, just because it was Christmas week,
and coming from all over town with little things we had made, and
standing there in line to send ’em off to folks. And I thought of all
the other folks in all the other post-offices in the world, doing the
self-same thing that night. And I felt all kind of nice and glowing to
think I was one of ’em. Only I did begin to wish we were enough
civilized to get the glow some other way.
“I guess it’s going to take a long time,” says Mis’ Holcomb, patient.
“Stubby, you needn’t wait if you’ve anything else to do.”
“Oh,” says Stubby, important, “I’ve got a present to mail.”
A present to mail! When Sodality had been feeding him for five weeks
among us!
Mis’ Holcomb and I exchanged our next two glances.
“What is it, Stubby?” asks Mis’ Holcomb, that is some direct by nature
and never denies herself at it.
He looked up kind of shy--he’s a nice little boy, when anybody has any
time to pay any attention to him.
“It’s just this,” he said, and took it out from under his coat. It was
about as big as a candy box, and he’d wrapped it up himself, and the
string was so loose and the paper was so tore that they weren’t going to
stay by each other past two stations.
“Mercy!” says Mis’ Holcomb, “leave me tie it up for you.”
She took it. And in order to tie it she had to untie it. And when she
done that, what was in it come all untied. And she see, and we both of
us see, what was in it. It was a great big pink rose, fresh and real,
with a lot of soaking wet paper wrapped round the stem.
“Stubby Mosher!” says Mis’ Holcomb straight out, “where’d _you_ get
this?”
He colored up. “I bought it to the greenhouse,” he says. “I’m a-goin’ to
shovel paths till the first of March to pay for it. And they gimme one
path ahead for postage.”
“Who you sending it to?” says Mis’ Holcomb, blunt--and I kind of wished
she wouldn’t, because the folks right round us was beginning to listen.
“To mother,” says Stubby.
Mis’ Holcomb near dropped the box. “My land!” she said, “why didn’t you
_take_ it to her? You’re goin’ to-morrow to spend Christmas with her,
ain’t you?”
Stubby shook his head and swallowed some.
“I ain’t going,” he told her.
“Ain’t going!” Mis’ Holcomb says. “_Why_ ain’t you goin’, I’d like to
know, when you was promised?”
“My brother wrote he can’t,” said Stubby. “He’s had some money to pay.
He can’t send me. I----”
He stopped, and looked down on the floor as hard as ever he could, and
swallowed like lightning.
“Well, but that’s how we got her to go there,” Mis’ Holcomb says. “We
promised her you’d come.”
“My brother wrote he can’t.” Stubby said it over.
Mis’ Holcomb looked at me for just one minute. Then her thoughts took
shape in her head, and out.
“How much money has Sodality got in the treasury?” she says to me.
“Forty-six cents,” says I, that’s treasurer and drove to death for a
fund for us.
“How much is the fare to Wooster?”
“Three fifty-five each way,” says Stubby, ready, but hopeless.
“My land!” says Mis’ Holcomb, “they ain’t a woman in Sodality that can
afford the seven dollars--nor a man in the town’ll see it like we do.
And no time to raise nothing. And that poor woman off there....”
She stared out over the crowd, kind of wild.
The line was edging along up to the window, and still talking about it.
“...Elsie and Mame that I haven’t sent a thing to,” Mis’ Merriman was
saying. “I just must get out and find something to-morrow, if it does
get there late. But I’m sure I donno what....”
“...disappointed me last minute on two Irish crochet collars,” Mis’
Wiswell was holding forth, in her voice that talks like her vocal cords
had gone flat, same as car-wheels.
“I’ve got company coming to-morrow, and I just simply will _have_ to let
both presents go, if I stay awake all night about it, as stay awake I
s’pose I shall.”