CHRISTMAS AT FOUR WINDS
At first Anne and Gilbert talked of going home to Avonlea for
Christmas; but eventually they decided to stay in Four Winds. “I want
to spend the first Christmas of our life together in our own home,”
decreed Anne.
So it fell out that Marilla and Mrs. Rachel Lynde and the twins came to
Four Winds for Christmas. Marilla had the face of a woman who had
circumnavigated the globe. She had never been sixty miles away from
home before; and she had never eaten a Christmas dinner anywhere save
at Green Gables.
Mrs. Rachel had made and brought with her an enormous plum pudding.
Nothing could have convinced Mrs. Rachel that a college graduate of the
younger generation could make a Christmas plum pudding properly; but
she bestowed approval on Anne’s house.
“Anne’s a good housekeeper,” she said to Marilla in the spare room the
night of their arrival. “I’ve looked into her bread box and her scrap
pail. I always judge a housekeeper by those, that’s what. There’s
nothing in the pail that shouldn’t have been thrown away, and no stale
pieces in the bread box. Of course, she was trained up with you--but,
then, she went to college afterwards. I notice she’s got my tobacco
stripe quilt on the bed here, and that big round braided mat of yours
before her living-room fire. It makes me feel right at home.”
Anne’s first Christmas in her own house was as delightful as she could
have wished. The day was fine and bright; the first skim of snow had
fallen on Christmas Eve and made the world beautiful; the harbor was
still open and glittering.
Captain Jim and Miss Cornelia came to dinner. Leslie and Dick had been
invited, but Leslie made excuse; they always went to her Uncle Isaac
West’s for Christmas, she said.
“She’d rather have it so,” Miss Cornelia told Anne. “She can’t bear
taking Dick where there are strangers. Christmas is always a hard time
for Leslie. She and her father used to make a lot of it.”
Miss Cornelia and Mrs. Rachel did not take a very violent fancy to each
other. “Two suns hold not their courses in one sphere.” But they did
not clash at all, for Mrs. Rachel was in the kitchen helping Anne and
Marilla with the dinner, and it fell to Gilbert to entertain Captain
Jim and Miss Cornelia,--or rather to be entertained by them, for a
dialogue between those two old friends and antagonists was assuredly
never dull.
“It’s many a year since there was a Christmas dinner here, Mistress
Blythe,” said Captain Jim. “Miss Russell always went to her friends in
town for Christmas. But I was here to the first Christmas dinner that
was ever eaten in this house--and the schoolmaster’s bride cooked it.
That was sixty years ago today, Mistress Blythe--and a day very like
this--just enough snow to make the hills white, and the harbor as blue
as June. I was only a lad, and I’d never been invited out to dinner
before, and I was too shy to eat enough. I’ve got all over THAT.”
“Most men do,” said Miss Cornelia, sewing furiously. Miss Cornelia was
not going to sit with idle hands, even on Christmas.
Babies come without any consideration for holidays, and there was one
expected in a poverty-stricken household at Glen St. Mary. Miss
Cornelia had sent that household a substantial dinner for its little
swarm, and so meant to eat her own with a comfortable conscience.
“Well, you know, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,
Cornelia,” explained Captain Jim.
“I believe you--when he HAS a heart,” retorted Miss Cornelia. “I
suppose that’s why so many women kill themselves cooking--just as poor
Amelia Baxter did. She died last Christmas morning, and she said it
was the first Christmas since she was married that she didn’t have to
cook a big, twenty-plate dinner. It must have been a real pleasant
change for her. Well, she’s been dead a year, so you’ll soon hear of
Horace Baxter taking notice.”
“I heard he was taking notice already,” said Captain Jim, winking at
Gilbert. “Wasn’t he up to your place one Sunday lately, with his
funeral blacks on, and a boiled collar?”
“No, he wasn’t. And he needn’t come neither. I could have had him
long ago when he was fresh. I don’t want any second-hand goods,
believe ME. As for Horace Baxter, he was in financial difficulties a
year ago last summer, and he prayed to the Lord for help; and when his
wife died and he got her life insurance he said he believed it was the
answer to his prayer. Wasn’t that like a man?”
“Have you really proof that he said that, Cornelia?”
“I have the Methodist minister’s word for it--if you call THAT proof.
Robert Baxter told me the same thing too, but I admit THAT isn’t
evidence. Robert Baxter isn’t often known to tell the truth.”
“Come, come, Cornelia, I think he generally tells the truth, but he
changes his opinion so often it sometimes sounds as if he didn’t.”
“It sounds like it mighty often, believe ME. But trust one man to
excuse another. I have no use for Robert Baxter. He turned Methodist
just because the Presbyterian choir happened to be singing ‘Behold the
bridegroom cometh’ for a collection piece when him and Margaret walked
up the aisle the Sunday after they were married. Served him right for
being late! He always insisted the choir did it on purpose to insult
him, as if he was of that much importance. But that family always
thought they were much bigger potatoes than they really were. His
brother Eliphalet imagined the devil was always at his elbow--but _I_
never believed the devil wasted that much time on him.”
“I--don’t--know,” said Captain Jim thoughtfully. “Eliphalet Baxter
lived too much alone--hadn’t even a cat or dog to keep him human. When
a man is alone he’s mighty apt to be with the devil--if he ain’t with
God. He has to choose which company he’ll keep, I reckon. If the
devil always was at Life Baxter’s elbow it must have been because Life
liked to have him there.”
“Man-like,” said Miss Cornelia, and subsided into silence over a
complicated arrangement of tucks until Captain Jim deliberately stirred
her up again by remarking in a casual way:
“I was up to the Methodist church last Sunday morning.”
“You’d better have been home reading your Bible,” was Miss Cornelia’s
retort.
“Come, now, Cornelia, _I_ can’t see any harm in going to the Methodist
church when there’s no preaching in your own. I’ve been a Presbyterian
for seventy-six years, and it isn’t likely my theology will hoist
anchor at this late day.”
“It’s setting a bad example,” said Miss Cornelia grimly.
“Besides,” continued wicked Captain Jim, “I wanted to hear some good
singing. The Methodists have a good choir; and you can’t deny,
Cornelia, that the singing in our church is awful since the split in
the choir.”
“What if the singing isn’t good? They’re doing their best, and God
sees no difference between the voice of a crow and the voice of a
nightingale.”
“Come, come, Cornelia,” said Captain Jim mildly, “I’ve a better opinion
of the Almighty’s ear for music than THAT.”
“What caused the trouble in our choir?” asked Gilbert, who was
suffering from suppressed laughter.
“It dates back to the new church, three years ago,” answered Captain
Jim. “We had a fearful time over the building of that church--fell out
over the question of a new site. The two sites wasn’t more’n two
hundred yards apart, but you’d have thought they was a thousand by the
bitterness of that fight. We was split up into three factions--one
wanted the east site and one the south, and one held to the old. It
was fought out in bed and at board, and in church and at market. All
the old scandals of three generations were dragged out of their graves
and aired. Three matches was broken up by it. And the meetings we had
to try to settle the question! Cornelia, will you ever forget the one
when old Luther Burns got up and made a speech? HE stated his opinions
forcibly.”
“Call a spade a spade, Captain. You mean he got red-mad and raked them
all, fore and aft. They deserved it too--a pack of incapables. But
what would you expect of a committee of men? That building committee
held twenty-seven meetings, and at the end of the twenty-seventh
weren’t no nearer having a church than when they begun--not so near,
for a fact, for in one fit of hurrying things along they’d gone to work
and tore the old church down, so there we were, without a church, and
no place but the hall to worship in.”
“The Methodists offered us their church, Cornelia.”
“The Glen St. Mary church wouldn’t have been built to this day,” went
on Miss Cornelia, ignoring Captain Jim, “if we women hadn’t just
started in and took charge. We said WE meant to have a church, if the
men meant to quarrel till doomsday, and we were tired of being a
laughing-stock for the Methodists. We held ONE meeting and elected a
committee and canvassed for subscriptions. We got them, too. When any
of the men tried to sass us we told them they’d tried for two years to
build a church and it was our turn now. We shut them up close, believe
ME, and in six months we had our church. Of course, when the men saw
we were determined they stopped fighting and went to work, man-like, as
soon as they saw they had to, or quit bossing. Oh, women can’t preach
or be elders; but they can build churches and scare up the money for
them.”
“The Methodists allow women to preach,” said Captain Jim.
Miss Cornelia glared at him.
“I never said the Methodists hadn’t common sense, Captain. What I say
is, I doubt if they have much religion.”
“I suppose you are in favor of votes for women, Miss Cornelia,” said
Gilbert.
“I’m not hankering after the vote, believe ME,” said Miss Cornelia
scornfully. “_I_ know what it is to clean up after the men. But some
of these days, when the men realize they’ve got the world into a mess
they can’t get it out of, they’ll be glad to give us the vote, and
shoulder their troubles over on us. That’s THEIR scheme. Oh, it’s
well that women are patient, believe ME!”
“What about Job?” suggested Captain Jim.
“Job! It was such a rare thing to find a patient man that when one was
really discovered they were determined he shouldn’t be forgotten,”
retorted Miss Cornelia triumphantly. “Anyhow, the virtue doesn’t go
with the name. There never was such an impatient man born as old Job
Taylor over harbor.”
“Well, you know, he had a good deal to try him, Cornelia. Even you
can’t defend his wife. I always remember what old William MacAllister
said of her at her funeral, ‘There’s nae doot she was a Chreestian
wumman, but she had the de’il’s own temper.’”
“I suppose she WAS trying,” admitted Miss Cornelia reluctantly, “but
that didn’t justify what Job said when she died. He rode home from the
graveyard the day of the funeral with my father. He never said a word
till they got near home. Then he heaved a big sigh and said, ‘You may
not believe it, Stephen, but this is the happiest day of my life!’
Wasn’t that like a man?”
“I s’pose poor old Mrs. Job did make life kinder uneasy for him,”
reflected Captain Jim.
“Well, there’s such a thing as decency, isn’t there? Even if a man is
rejoicing in his heart over his wife being dead, he needn’t proclaim it
to the four winds of heaven. And happy day or not, Job Taylor wasn’t
long in marrying again, you might notice. His second wife could manage
him. She made him walk Spanish, believe me! The first thing she did
was to make him hustle round and put up a tombstone to the first Mrs.
Job--and she had a place left on it for her own name. She said there’d
be nobody to make Job put up a monument to HER.”
“Speaking of Taylors, how is Mrs. Lewis Taylor up at the Glen, doctor?”
asked Captain Jim.
“She’s getting better slowly--but she has to work too hard,” replied
Gilbert.
“Her husband works hard too--raising prize pigs,” said Miss Cornelia.
“He’s noted for his beautiful pigs. He’s a heap prouder of his pigs
than of his children. But then, to be sure, his pigs are the best pigs
possible, while his children don’t amount to much. He picked a poor
mother for them, and starved her while she was bearing and rearing
them. His pigs got the cream and his children got the skim milk.
“There are times, Cornelia, when I have to agree with you, though it
hurts me,” said Captain Jim. “That’s just exactly the truth about
Lewis Taylor. When I see those poor, miserable children of his, robbed
of all children ought to have, it p’isens my own bite and sup for days
afterwards.”
Gilbert went out to the kitchen in response to Anne’s beckoning. Anne
shut the door and gave him a connubial lecture.
“Gilbert, you and Captain Jim must stop baiting Miss Cornelia. Oh,
I’ve been listening to you--and I just won’t allow it.”
‘Anne, Miss Cornelia is enjoying herself hugely. You know she is.’
“Well, never mind. You two needn’t egg her on like that. Dinner is
ready now, and, Gilbert, DON’T let Mrs. Rachel carve the geese. I know
she means to offer to do it because she doesn’t think you can do it
properly. Show her you can.”
“I ought to be able to. I’ve been studying A-B-C-D diagrams of carving
for the past month,” said Gilbert. “Only don’t talk to me while I’m
doing it, Anne, for if you drive the letters out of my head I’ll be in
a worse predicament than you were in old geometry days when the teacher
changed them.”
Gilbert carved the geese beautifully. Even Mrs. Rachel had to admit
that. And everybody ate of them and enjoyed them. Anne’s first
Christmas dinner was a great success and she beamed with housewifely
pride. Merry was the feast and long; and when it was over they
gathered around the cheer of the red hearth flame and Captain Jim told
them stories until the red sun swung low over Four Winds Harbor, and
the long blue shadows of the Lombardies fell across the snow in the
lane.
“I must be getting back to the light,” he said finally. “I’ll jest
have time to walk home before sundown. Thank you for a beautiful
Christmas, Mistress Blythe. Bring Master Davy down to the light some
night before he goes home.
“I want to see those stone gods,” said Davy with a relish.