_Beulah Marie Dix_
“I want to go,” said Justine Eliot, “where I won’t even hear the word
Christmas. If you’d only open the camp, Doctor Sarah, we could stay
there, just by our two selves, until these ghastly holidays are over.
Oh, won’t you, please?”
Justine Eliot was nineteen, far richer in money than she needed to be,
and as pretty as a blush-rose. Until a year ago she had known nothing
but sunshine. This fact Dr. Sarah Peavey took into swift account, and
she did not say, “Don’t be a coward! Face it out!”
“You see, there were two of us a year ago,” Justine went on, “and now
I’m all alone. Oh, if I’d only gone down-town that day with mother! But
she said it was a secret, and I wasn’t to come. And I said I didn’t
want to come, for I had a secret, too. It was a pillow I was covering
for her as a Christmas present--the fir-balsam pillow that I’d made
that summer at the camp. I finished it that afternoon, and tied it up
with red ribbons. There were Christmas wreaths in all the windows, and
holly paper and red ribbon everywhere. You know how mother loved the
Christmas season, and how she remembered everybody. Oh, it was too
cruel that she should leave us then! And if I’d only been with her, I
know it wouldn’t have happened. But that crowded, slippery crossing,
and that automobile bearing down--and I wasn’t there! I never want to
see green holly or red ribbons again. I think if I hear people say,
‘Merry Christmas!’ I shall die. And I wish I could!”
Justine broke into sobs, with her face in her hands.
For a moment Doctor Peavey watched her through narrowed eyelids. Then
she took a time-table from the drawer of her desk, and said:
“I’ll leave my patients with Deering. I’ll telegraph Serena Wetherbee
to open the camp for us. Meet me at the station to-morrow evening,
and--”
“Doctor Sarah! Then you will?”
“Yes, I’ll take you where Christmas won’t find you--if I can!”
Surely no better refuge could have been found for Christmas fugitives
than the camp on Nobsco Head. Clad in black firs and bound with iron
rock, the headland thrust itself into the icy waters of the bay.
Half-buried now in the white drifts of winter, the little house stood
solitary--three miles by road from the village of Crosset Cove, and a
half-mile, at least, from the little settlement known as Hardscrabble.
It was from Hardscrabble that Serena Wetherbee came--a grim, gaunt
woman, who not only had lost three children, but had never learned from
the waves where they had flung the body of her sailor husband. To warn
her not to talk of Christmas seemed superfluous. But on the fourth
evening, while they were all three sitting round the glowing airtight
stove in the camp living-room, Justine politely asked Serena what she
was knitting, and received an unexpected answer.
“Christmas presents,” said Serena Wetherbee. “A pair of mittens for
Jacob Tracy, and striped reins for his little sister Emmy. Haven’t
you noticed? He’s Heman Tracy’s boy, that brings the milk over from
Hardscrabble, and they’re poorer than Job’s turkey. There’ll be a tree
over at Hardscrabble schoolhouse,--there always is,--and those Tracy
young ones shan’t go without presents, not while I’m afoot.”
With a word of excuse and good night, Justine rose and went to her
room. But Serena Wetherbee talked on:
“I don’t know, after all, if there’ll be a tree this year at
Hardscrabble. Have you seen the school-ma’am, Doctor Sarah? She’s a
Nash, from over in Jefferson--one of those bred-in-the-bone old maids
that would turn cream sour just by looking at it. Like as not she’ll
set up for not having a tree to the schoolhouse.”
But evidently Serena did not believe this dire prophecy, for she was as
horrified as Doctor Peavey by the developments of the next day. The two
women were in the kitchen when small Jacob Tracy clumped in out of the
twilight, leading a sobbing little sister.
“Now you just shut up, Emmy Tracy!” Jacob said, but not unkindly. “You
ask Aunt Sereny and she’ll tell you it ain’t so at all.”
Serena Wetherbee lifted the child to her lap.
“Tell aunty all about it, deary!”
“She says--teacher says--there ain’t--there ain’t no Sa-anta Claus--and
there won’t be a tree at Hardscrabble--and no Christmas! And I’d wrote
Santa Claus--to bring me a dolly with hair--and there ain’t--there
ain’t no--”
“Teacher doesn’t know everything!” snapped Serena Wetherbee.
With assurances and molasses cookies, the two women comforted the
child. She left the house with a watery smile, but Jacob lingered to
say:
“And do you think he’ll come to Hardscrabble, for all she said?”
A few moments later, when Doctor Peavey passed through the open door to
the living-room, she found Justine seated with a book at the table.
“What were they crying for?” asked Justine.
“Miss Nash, who teaches the school at Hardscrabble, where the little
ones go, told them that there was no Santa Claus.”
“To tell a child that at Christmas time!” flashed Justine. “She ought
to be whipped!”
“That wouldn’t help the children much,” said Doctor Peavey, mildly, “or
her, either.”
To Justine Doctor Peavey said no more, but she took counsel with
Serena. That evening, after Justine had gone thoughtfully to bed,
Doctor Peavey made out a list of the names and ages of the eighteen
children who went to the little school at Hardscrabble. On the same
sheet she made some tentative calculations--so much for oranges, so
much for crinkly Christmas candy, so much for gifts, to be bought at
the ten-cent store at Hanscomville. It was only a small sum, but, small
as it was, it meant that Doctor Peavey would go without the evenings at
the opera which were the one luxury of her winter.
The next morning, December 22d, Doctor Peavey tucked her list into her
pocket and started afoot for Hardscrabble, where she planned to hire a
horse and pung from Cephas Tooke. She had bidden Justine good-by for
the day without explanation. A little wholesome neglect would be tonic
for Justine, she believed; and she believed also that you may sometimes
attain your goal, like Alice in the Looking-Glass country, by walking
away from it.
She was to have speedy confirmation of her belief. She had barely
started down the shining hill slope to the wood-path, when she heard
the crackling of a step behind her, and turned to see Justine, as
warmly bundled up as she was herself, with her purse in her mittened
hand. The color came and went in Justine’s cheeks. For the moment she
seemed again the girl that Doctor Peavey had known in joyous summers at
the camp.
“Doctor Sarah!” Justine began, breathlessly. “I didn’t mean to peep,
but your writing is so big and clear! I only glanced at your list
by mistake, but I knew in a minute, and I might have known anyway,
knowing you. But why didn’t you ask me to help? Oh, you surely don’t
think I’m like that horrible Miss Nash? I don’t want Christmas for
myself ever again, but I wouldn’t take it away from other people, and
least of all from little children. So let me help, please!”
For one second Doctor Peavey’s heart contracted. She saw the purse
in Justine’s hand, and she read the passing thought in Justine’s
mind. Would she have to tell Justine that money alone could not buy a
Christmas gift, even of the poorest sort? But Mrs. Eliot, as Doctor
Peavey had often said, was one of the finest women that she had ever
known, and Justine was her daughter.
“Oh!” said Justine, with a little catch of the breath. “You think that
I should--” She slipped the purse into her pocket. “Of course you can’t
do it all alone. Eighteen children!” she cried. “I’m coming with you,
Doctor Sarah!”
Together they trudged through the cathedral gloom of the firs and over
the dazzling whiteness of the fields to Hardscrabble. Together they
clambered into the ramshackle pung and drove the nine bright miles to
Hanscomville. Such plans as they made on that drive! They would have
a tree set up in Serena Wetherbee’s cottage, if the odious Miss Nash
still refused to let them have the schoolhouse. They would string
pop-corn and red cranberries by the yard.
“And we’ll buy lots of sparkly snow and shiny doodaddles at the
ten-cent store!” cried Justine. Her eyes were as bright as Christmas
stars.
“We’ll cut the candy-bags in the shape of stockings. And we’ll buy a
‘dolly with hair’ for that wee Emmy. I’ll have time to make it a dress
and a petticoat, at least. And I’m going to get a sled for Jacob Tracy.”
So they planned all along the road, which seemed short, and in
Hanscomville they made the plans come true. Up and down the little
main street they bustled, and made their purchases, Doctor Peavey
painstakingly, Justine with a lavish hand.
Presently they were stuffing packages into the pung--bags of oranges
and nuts and Christmas candies from the grocer’s, bulging, frail
bundles from the ten-cent store, skates and pocket-knives--an
extravagance at which Doctor Peavey held up her hands--from the
hardware shop, and even lordly, important-looking parcels from the
general store. Among the last was a doll’s carriage.
“It’s for Emmy’s doll,” said Justine, “and we must find room for it,
even if we have to tow it behind the pung.”
On the way home they chatted about their Christmas tree.
“It’s the sort of thing that mother would have loved to do,” Justine
said, and then she began to talk about her mother, and to tell sweet,
homely incidents of the life that they had lived together.
They had passed through Crosset Cove when Doctor Peavey broke the not
unhappy silence into which they had lapsed.
“Justine! If we haven’t forgotten to get a present for the
schoolteacher!”
“For that Nash woman?” cried Justine. “She doesn’t deserve a present. I
shouldn’t like to say what she does deserve.”
Then they reached the long tug of Nobsco Hill, where, in mercy to the
tired old horse, they got out and walked. At the top of the hill they
overtook a woman, who was trudging on foot in the twilight. She was
thirty, perhaps, with a thin, tired face. She wore a coat that was not
thick enough, and a little, old-fashioned neck-piece of worn fur. She
was dragging a small fir-tree through the snow, and every little while
she stopped to beat her numbed hands together.
“I thought I knew everybody in these parts,” said Doctor Peavey, under
her breath, “but she’s a stranger. Why, it must be Miss Nash!”
The woman turned as Doctor Peavey spoke to her. Oh, yes, she would be
glad of a lift, she said, in a tired voice. She had been out getting
a little tree for her school children. She did not want them to think
that Santa Claus had forgotten them.
Doctor Peavey’s eyes, seeking Justine’s, read assent in their softened
expression.
“We were planning a little surprise for your children,” she said, “but
we’ll need help to put it through. Couldn’t you spend the night with
us, and string cranberries and sew candy-bags?”
So the amazing thing came to pass--the odious Miss Nash sat that
evening at the camp table, and worked swiftly to make real the
Christmas plans. So silent and so white she was that even Serena
forbore to sniff at her.
And a yet more amazing thing came to pass. The next morning, when
Doctor Peavey had prepared a hot early breakfast for Miss Nash, and had
set her part way on her road to the schoolhouse, she returned to camp
to find Justine--the old Justine of Nobsco summers--waiting to confide
in her.
“She isn’t horrid at all!” Justine broke out. “It’s Ellen Nash, I mean.
After you sent us upstairs last night and said that we must rest--did
you do it on purpose, Doctor Sarah?--she talked to me. She said she
hadn’t talked in months. It was the picture, you know, there on my
bureau. She asked if it was my mother, and I--I told her how she died
a year ago. And then she told me. Doctor Sarah, there are just she and
her mother--and her mother is at the sanitarium with tuberculosis.
What chance she has to get well is spoiled by her fretting to have
her daughter near her, and they have so little money that that is
out of the question. So Ellen Nash has been trying to earn a little
by teaching. On Wednesday she got notice from the committee that she
wouldn’t be reëngaged for next term. And the same day she had a letter
from her mother--a pitiful letter! That Christmas was coming, and they
couldn’t be together--that they would never be together! And she says
she guesses she was half-crazy, but that morning, when little Emmy
Tracy asked her if Santa Claus would come this Christmas, she answered
right out of her heart that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and that all
the talk about love and Christmas fellowship was just a story. O poor
thing! I can understand! Why, Doctor Sarah, she only went one little
inch farther than I had gone, and she is so much worse off than I. For
my blessed mother never suffered any, and we were together up to the
very last hour. Doctor Sarah!”
“Yes, Justine?”
“I--I haven’t been doing this year as mother would have expected me to
do.”
“That’s all over now,” said Doctor Peavey, heartily. She hardly knew
how truly she had spoken, but she knew an hour later, when Justine
again was at her side.
“Doctor Sarah,” she said, with her old energy, “can we go home
to-night, on the night train?”
“What of our tree at Hardscrabble?”
“Of course we won’t disappoint the children. We’ll write a letter,
in the name of Santa Claus, and ask them to Serena Wetherbee’s on
Christmas day. She says she’d be glad to have them. You wouldn’t think,
to look at her dear old granite face, that she loved children so. And
Ellen Nash will have the tree and the presents all ready. O Doctor
Sarah, it would have made you cry to hear how she went out to get a
tree, and had even taken some of her hard-earned money to buy nuts and
apples for the children, because she wanted to make up for what she
had said! But now they’ll have a sure-enough Christmas at Hardscrabble,
and we’ll go home. There’s so much I must do, and only a day to do it
in! So many children that mother wouldn’t want to have go unremembered!
And you, Doctor Sarah, you’re willing to go home?”
“Yes,” said Doctor Peavey.
It was a Christmas of bright sun and glad weather. Sarah Peavey and
her sister set crimson roses beneath their mother’s picture and opened
their gifts in its presence. Sarah Peavey had the medical book that
she had needed, and a brown print of a Madonna, and even a ticket for
the opera. But the gift that she valued most came in the twilight. The
telephone-bell rang, and over the wire came Justine Eliot’s voice:
“Is it you, dear Doctor Sarah? I wanted to tell you. I’ve seen my old
cousin Hester. She’s tired of hiring maids, you know, and she’s been
looking for a woman to be a sort of companion housekeeper in her little
apartment. I told her about Ellen Nash, and she’s sending for her.
She’ll pay her three times what the Hardscrabble school paid, and Miss
Nash will be able to go often to see her mother. Doctor Sarah!”
“Yes, Justine.”
“Do you remember my telling you about that fir-balsam pillow I made up
last year--the one I thought I couldn’t ever touch again?”
“I remember, child.”
“I sent it off yesterday, in holly wrappings--to Ellen Nash’s mother.
And that’s all, Doctor Sarah, dear, only--I wanted to wish you--Merry
Christmas!”
[14] This story was first printed in “Youth’s Companion,” December 14,
1911. Reprinted by permission of the author and “Youth’s Companion.”