by A. A. Milne
* * *
Taken all in all it was not a Christmas Morning of sentiment but a Christmas morning of _works_! Kitchen works, mostly! Useful, flavorous adventures with a turkey! A somewhat nervous sally with an apple pie! Intermittently, of course, a few experiments with flour paste! A flaire or two with a paint brush! An errand to the attic! Interminable giggles!
* * *
Surely it was four o'clock before she was even ready to start for the Rattle-Pane House. And "starting" is by no means the same as arriving. Dragging a sledful of miscellaneous Christmas goods an eighth of a mile over bare ground is not an easy task. She had to make three tugging trips. And each start was delayed by her big gray pussy cat stealing out to try to follow her. And each arrival complicated by the yelpings and leapings and general cavortings of four dogs who didn't see any reason in the world why they shouldn't escape from their forced imprisonment in the shed-yard and prance home with her. Even with the third start and the third arrival finally accomplished, the crafty cat stood waiting for her on the steps of the Rattle-Pane House,--back arched, fur bristled, spitting like some new kind of weather-cock at the storm in the shed-yard, and had to be thrust quite unceremoniously into a much too small covered basket and lashed down with yards and yards of tinsel that was needed quite definitely for something else.--It isn't just the way of the Transgressor that's hard.--Nobody's way is any too easy!
* * *
The door-key, though, was exactly where the old Butler had said it would be,--under the door mat, and the key itself turned astonishingly cordially in the rusty old lock. Never in her whole little life having owned a door-key to her own house it seemed quite an adventure in itself to be walking thus possessively through an unfamiliar hall into an absolutely unknown kitchen and goodness knew what on either side and beyond.
* * *
Perfectly simply too as the old Butler had promised, the four dog dishes, heaping to the brim, loomed in prim line upon the kitchen table waiting for distribution.
* * *
"U-m-m," sniffed Flame. "Nothing but mush! _Mush_!--All over the world to-day I suppose--while their masters are feasting at other people's houses on puddings and--and cigarettes! How the poor darlings must suffer! Locked in sheds! Tied in yards! Stuffed down cellar!"
* * *
"Me-o-w," twinged a plaintive hint from the hallway just outside.
* * *
"Oh, but cats are different," argued Flame. "So soft, so plushy, so spineless! Cats were _meant_ to be stuffed into things."
* * *
Without further parleying she doffed her red tam and sweater, donned a huge white all-enveloping pinafore, and started to ameliorate as best she could the Christmas sufferings of the "poor darlings" immediately at hand.
* * *
It was at least a yellow kitchen,--or had been once. In all that gray, dank, neglected house, the one suggestion of old sunshine.
* * *
"We shall have our dinner here," chuckled Flame. "After the carols--we shall have our dinner here."
* * *
Very boisterously in the yard just outside the window the four dogs scuffled and raced for sheer excitement and joy at this most unexpected advent of human companionship. Intermittently from time to time by the aid of old boxes or barrels they clawed their way up to the cobwebby window-sill to peer at the strange proceedings. Intermittently from time to time they fell back into the frozen yard in a chaos of fur and yelps.
* * *
By five o'clock certainly the faded yellow kitchen must have looked very strange, even to a dog!
* * *
Straight down its dingy, wobbly-floored center stretched a long table cheerfully spread with "the Rev. Mrs. Flamande Nourice's" second best table cloth. Quaint high-backed chairs dragged in from the shadowy parlor circled the table. A pleasant china plate gleamed like a hand-painted moon before each chair. At one end of the table loomed a big brown turkey; at the other, the appropriate vegetables. Pies, cakes, and doughnuts, interspersed themselves between. Green wreaths streaming with scarlet ribbons hung nonchalantly across every chair-top. Tinsel garlands shone on the walls. In the doorway reared a hastily constructed mimicry of a railroad crossing sign.
* * *
[Illustration]
* * *
Directly opposite and conspicuously placed above the rusty stove-pipe stretched the Parish's Gift Motto--duly re-adjusted.
* * *
"_Peace_ on _Earth_, Good Will to _Dogs_."
* * *
"Fatuously silly," admitted Flame even to herself. "But yet it does add something to the Gayety of Rations!"
* * *
Stepping aside for a single thrilling moment to study the full effect of her handiwork, the first psychological puzzle of her life smote sharply across her senses. Namely, that you never really get the whole fun out of anything unless you are absolutely alone.--But the very first instant you find yourself absolutely alone with a Really-Good-Time you begin to twist and turn and hunt about for somebody Very Special to share it with you!
* * *
The only "Very Special" person that Flame could think of was "Bertrand the Lay Reader."
* * *
All a-blush with the sheer mental surprise of it she fled to the shed door to summon the dogs.
* * *
"Maybe even the dogs won't come!" she reasoned hectically. "Maybe nothing will come! Maybe that's always the way things happen when you get your own way about something else!"
* * *
Like a blast from the Arctic the Christmas twilight swept in on her. It crisped her cheeks,--crinkled her hair! Turned her spine to a wisp of tinsel! All outdoors seemed suddenly creaking with frost! All indoors, with _unknownness_!
* * *
"Come, Beautiful-Lovely!" she implored. "Come, Lopsy! Miss Flora! Come, Blunder-Blot!'"
* * *
But there was really no need of entreaty. A turn of the door-knob would have brought them! Leaping, loping, four abreast, they came plunging like so many North Winds to their party! Streak of Snow,--Glow of Fire,--Frozen Mud--Sun-Spot!--Yelping-mouthed--slapping-tailed! Backs bristling! Legs stiffening! Wolf Hound, Setter, Bull Dog, Dalmatian,--each according to his kind, hurtling, crowding!
* * *
"Oh, dear me, dear me," struggled Flame. "Maybe a carol would calm them."
* * *
To a certain extent a carol surely did. The hair-cloth parlor of the Rattle-Pane House would have calmed anything. And the mousey smell of the old piano fairly jerked the dogs to its senile old ivory keyboard. Cocking their ears to its quavering treble notes,--snorting their nostrils through its gritty guttural basses, they watched Flame's facile fingers sweep from sound to sound.
* * *
"Oh, what a--glorious lark!" quivered Flame. "What a--a _lonely_ glorious lark!"
* * *
Timidly at first but with an increasing abandon, half laughter and half tears, the clear young soprano voice took up its playful paraphrase,
* * *
"God rest you merrie--animals!
Let nothing you dismay!"
* * *
caroled Flame.
* * *
"For--"
* * *
It was just at this moment that Beautiful-Lovely, the Wolf Hound,--muzzled lifted, eyes rolling, jabbed his shrill nose into space and harmony with a carol of his own,--octaves of agony,--Heaven knows what of ecstasy,--that would have hurried an owl to its nest, a ghoul to a moving picture show!
* * *
"Wow-Wow--_Wow_!" caroled Beautiful-Lovely. "Ww--ow--Ww--ow--_Ww--Oo--Wwwww_!"
* * *
As Flame's hands dropped from the piano the unmistakable creak of red wheels sounded on the frozen driveway just outside.
* * *
No one but "Bertrand the Lay Reader" drove a buggy with red wheels! To the infinite scandalization of the Parish--no one but "Bertrand the Lay Reader" drove a buggy with red wheels!--Fleet steps sounded suddenly
on the path! Startled fists beat furiously on the door!
* * *
"What is it? What is it?" shouted a familiar voice. "Whatever in the world is happening? Is it _murder_? Let me in! _Let me in!_"
* * *
"Sil--ly!" hissed Flame through a crack in the door. "It's nothing but a party! Don't you know a--a party when you hear it?"
* * *
For an instant only, blank silence greeted her confidence. Then "Bertrand the Lay Reader" relaxed in an indisputably genuine gasp of astonishment.
* * *
"Why! Why, is that you, Miss Flame?" he gasped. "Why, I thought it was a murder! Why--Why, whatever in the world are you doing here?"
* * *
"I--I'm having a party," hissed Flame through the key-hole.
* * *
"A--a--party?" stammered the Lay Reader. "Open the door!"
* * *
"No, I--can't," said Flame.
* * *
"Why not?" demanded the Lay Reader.
* * *
Helplessly in the darkness of the vestibule Flame looked up,--and down,--and sideways,--but met always in every direction the memory of her promise.
* * *
"I--I just can't," she admitted a bit weakly. "It wouldn't be convenient.--I--I've got trouble with my eyes."
* * *
"Trouble with your eyes?" questioned the Lay Reader.
* * *
"I didn't go away with my Father and Mother," confided Flame.
* * *
"No,--so I notice," observed the Lay Reader. "_Please_ open the door!"
* * *
"Why?" parried Flame.
* * *
"I've been looking for you everywhere," urged the Lay Reader. "At the Senior Warden's! At all the Vestrymen's houses! Even at the Sexton's! I knew you didn't go away! The Garage Man told me there were only two!--I thought surely I'd find you at your own house.--But I only found sled tracks."
* * *
"That was me,--I," mumbled Flame.
* * *
"And then I heard these awful screams," shuddered the Lay Reader.
* * *
"That was a Carol," said Flame.
* * *
"A Carol?" scoffed the Lay Reader. "Open the door!"
* * *
"Well--just a crack," conceded Flame.
* * *
It was astonishing how a man as broad-shouldered as the Lay Reader could pass so easily through a crack.
* * *
Conscience-stricken Flame fled before him with her elbow crooked across her forehead.
* * *
"Oh, my eyes! My eyes!" she cried.
* * *
"Well, really," puzzled the Lay Reader. "Though I claim, of course, to be ordinarily bright--I had never suspected myself of being actually dazzling."
* * *
"Oh, you're not bright at all," protested Flame. "It's just my promise.--I promised Mother not to see you!"
* * *
"Not to see _me_?" questioned the Lay Reader. It was astonishing how almost instantaneously a man as purely theoretical as the Lay Reader was supposed to be, thought of a perfectly practical solution to the difficulty. "Why--why we might tie my big handkerchief across your eyes," he suggested. "Just till we get this mystery straightened out.--Surely there is nothing more or less than just plain righteousness in--that!"
* * *
"What a splendid idea!" capitulated Flame. "But, of course, if I'm absolutely blindfolded," she wavered for a second only, "you'll have to lead me by the hand."
* * *
"I could do that," admitted the Lay Reader.
* * *
With the big white handkerchief once tied firmly across her eyes, Flame's last scruple vanished.
* * *
"Well, you see," she began quite precipitously, "I _did_ think it would be such fun to have a party!--A party all my own, I mean!--A party just exactly as I wanted it! No Parish in it at all! Or good works! Or anything! Just _fun_!--And as long as Mother and Father had to go away anyway--" Even though the blinding bandage the young eyes seemed to lift in a half wistful sort of appeal. "You see there's some sort of property involved," she confided quite impulsively. "Uncle Wally's making a new will. There's a corn-barn and a private chapel and a collection of Chinese lanterns and a piebald pony principally under dispute.--Mother, of course thinks we ought to have the corn-barn. But Father can't decide between the Chinese lanterns and the private chapel.--Personally," she sighed, "I'm hoping for the piebald pony."
* * *
"Yes, but this--party?" prodded the Lay Reader.
* * *
"Oh, yes,--the party--" quickened Flame.
* * *
"Why have it in a deserted house?" questioned the Lay Reader with some incisiveness.
* * *
Even with her eyes closely bandaged Flame could see perfectly clearly that the Lay Reader was really quite troubled.
* * *
"Oh, but you see it isn't exactly a deserted house," she explained.
* * *
"Who lives here?" demanded the Lay Reader.
* * *
"I don't know--exactly," admitted Flame. "But the Butler is a friend of mine and--"
* * *
"The--Butler is a friend of yours?" gasped the Lay Reader. Already, if Flame could only have seen it, his head was cocked with sudden intentness towards the parlor door. "There is certainly something very strange about all this," he whispered a bit hectically. "I could almost have sworn that I heard a faint scuffle,--the horrid sound of a person--strangling."
* * *
"Strangling?" giggled Flame. "Oh, that is just the sound of Miss Flora's 'girlish glee'! If she'd only be content to chew the corner of the piano cover! But when she insists on inhaling it, too!"
* * *
"Miss Flora?" gasped the Lay Reader. "Is this a Mad House?"
* * *
"Miss Flora is a--a dog," confided Flame a bit coolly. "I neglected--it seems--to state that this is a dog-party that I'm having."
* * *
"_Dogs_?" winced the Lay Reader. "Will they bite?"
* * *
"Only if you don't trust them," confided Flame.
* * *
"But it's so hard to trust a dog that will bite you if you don't trust him," frowned the Lay Reader. "It makes such a sort of a--a vicious circle, as it were."
* * *
"Vicious Circe?" mused Flame, a bit absent-mindedly. "No, I don't think it's nice at all to call Miss Flora a 'Vicious Circe.'" It was Flame's turn now to wince back a little. "I--I hate people who hate dogs!" she cried out quite abruptly.
* * *
"Oh, I don't hate them," lied the Lay Reader like a gentleman, "it's only that--that--. You see a dog bit me once!" he confided with significant emphasis.
* * *
"I--bit a dentist--once," mused Flame without any emphasis at all.
* * *
"Oh, but I say, Miss Flame," deprecated the Lay Reader. "That's different! When a dog bites you, you know, there's always more or less question whether he was mad or not."
* * *
"There doesn't seem to have been any question at all," mused Flame, "that _you_ were mad! Did you have _your_ head sent off to be investigated or anything?"
* * *
"Oh, I say, Miss Flame," implored the Lay Reader, "I tell you I _like_ dogs,--good dogs! I assure you I'm very--oh, very much interested in this dog party of yours! Such a quaint idea! So--so--! If I could be of any possible assistance?" he implored.
* * *
"Maybe you could be," relaxed Flame ever so faintly. "But if you're really coming to my party," she stiffened again, "you've got to behave like my party!"