Ho! Ho! Ho! Santa Claus' Reading List

by A. A. Milne

  So holly and mistletoe,

  So holly and mistletoe,

  Over and over and over, oh."

  * * *

  Buff, who was singing it, looked over his shoulder, and nodded.

  "They said you can't have no Christmas on Christmas Day," he observed, grinning, "but I ain't heard nothing to prevent singing Christmas carols right up to the day that is the day."

  Ebenezer halted.

  "How old are you?" he abruptly demanded of Buff—whom he had known from Buff's boyhood.

  "Thirty-three," said Buff, "dum it."

  "You and Bruce about the same age, ain't you?" said Ebenezer.

  Buff nodded.

  "Well," said Ebenezer, "well… ." and stood looking at him. Malcolm would have been his age, too.

  "Going down to the factory, are you?" Buff said. "Wait a bit. I'll hike on down ahead of you."

  He turned the snowplow down the factory road, as if he were making a triumphal progress, fashioning his snow borders with all the freedom of some sculpturing wind on summer clouds.

  * * *

  "One for the way it all begun,

  Two for the way it all has run… ."

  * * *

  he sang to the soft push and thud and clank of his going. He swept a circle in front of the little house that was the factory office, as if he had prepared the setting for a great event; and Ebenezer, following in the long, bright path, stepped into the hall of the house.

  For thirty years he had been accustomed to enter the little house with his mind ready to receive its interior of desks and shelves and safes and files. To-day, quite unexpectedly, as he opened the door, the thing that was in his mind was a hall stair with a red carpet, and a parlour adjoining with figured stuff at the windows and a coal fire in the stove… . And thirty-five years ago it had been that way, when he and his wife and child had lived in the little house where his business was then just starting at a machine set up in the woodshed. As his project had grown and his factory had arisen in the neighbouring lots, the family had moved farther up in the town. Remembrance had been divorced from this place for decades. To-day, without warning, it waited for him on the threshold.

  He had asked his bookkeeper to meet him there, but the man had not yet arrived. So Ebenezer himself kindled a fire in the rusty office stove, in the room where the figured curtains had been. The old account books that he wanted were not here on the shelves, nor in the cupboards of the cold adjoining rooms. They dated so far back that they had been filed away upstairs. He had not been upstairs in years, and his first impulse was to send his bookkeeper, when he should appear. But this, after all, was not Ebenezer's way; and he went up the stairs himself.

  Each upper room was like some one unconscious in stupor or death, and still as distinct in personality as if in some ancient activity. There was the shelf he had put up in their room, the burned place on the floor where he had tipped over a lamp, tattered shreds of the paper she had hung to surprise him, the little storeroom which they had cleared out for Malcolm when he was old enough, and whose door had had to be kept closed because innumerable uncaged birds lived there… .

  When he had gone through the piles of account books in a closet and those he sought were not found among them, he remembered the trunkful up in the tiny loft. He let down from the passage ceiling the ladder he had once hung there, and climbed up to the little roof recess.

  Light entered through four broken panes of skylight. It fell in a faint rug on the dusty floor. The roof sloped sharply, and the trunks and boxes had been pressed back to the rim of the place. Ebenezer put his hands out, groping. They touched an edge of something that swayed. He laid hold of it and drew it out and set down on the faint rug of light a small wooden hobbyhorse.

  He stood staring at it, remembering it as clearly as if some one had set before him the old white gate which he bestrode in his own boyhood. It was Malcolm's hobbyhorse, dappled gray, the tail and the mane missing and the paint worn off—and tenderly licked off—his nose. When they had moved to the other house, he had bought the boy a pony, and this horse had been left behind. Something else stirred in his memory, the name by which Malcolm had used to call his hobbyhorse, some ringing name … but he had forgotten. He thrust the thing back where it had been and went on with his search for the account books.

  By the time he had found them and had got down again in the office, the bookkeeper was there, keeping up the fire and uttering, with some acumen, comments on the obvious aspects of the weather, of the climate, of the visible universe. The bookkeeper was a young man, very ready to agree with Ebenezer for the sake of future favour, but with the wistfulness of all industrial machines constructed by men from human potentialities. Also, he had a cough and thin hands and a little family and no job.

  "Get to work on this book," Ebenezer bade him; "it's the one that began the business."

  The man opened the book, put it to his nearsighted eyes, frowned, and glanced up at Ebenezer.

  "I don't think it seems… ." he began doubtfully.

  "Well, don't think," said Ebenezer, sharply; "that's not needful. Read the first entries."

  The bookkeeper read:—

  * * *

  Picking hops (4 days)

  $1.00

  Sewing (Mrs. Shackell)

  .60

  Egg money (3-1/4 dozen)

  .75

  Winning puzzle

  2.50

  ——

  $4.86

  * * *

  Disbursed:

  Kitchen roller

  $ .10

  Coffee mill

  .50

  Shoes for M.

  1.25

  Water colors for M.

  .25

  Suit for M.

  2.00

  Gloves—me

  .50

  ——

  $4.75

  Cash on hand: 11 cents.

  * * *

  The bookkeeper paused again. Ebenezer, frowning, reached for the book. In his wife's fine faded writing were her accounts—after the eleven cents was a funny little face with which she had been wont to illustrate her letters. Ebenezer stared, grunted, turned to the last page of the book. There, in bold figures, the other way of the leaf, was his own accounting. He remembered now—he had kept his first books in the back of the account book that she had used for the house.

  Ebenezer glanced sharply at his bookkeeper. To his annoyance, the man was smiling with perfect comprehension and sympathy. Ebenezer averted his eyes, and the bookkeeper felt dimly that he had been guilty of an indelicacy toward his employer, and hastened to cover it.

  "Family life does cling to a man, sir," he said.

  "Do you find it so?" said Ebenezer, dryly. "Read, please."

  At noon Ebenezer walked home alone through the melting snow. And the Thought that he did not think, but that spoke to him without his knowing, said:—

  "Winning a puzzle—Two Dollars and a half. She never told me she tried to earn a little something that way."

  Chapter 8

  "If we took the day before Christmas an' had it for Christmas," observed Tab Winslow, "would that hurt?"

  "Eat your oatmeal," said Mis' Winslow, in the immemorial manner of adults.

  "Would it, would it, would it?" persisted Tab, in the immemorial manner of youth.

  "And have Theophilus Thistledown for dinner that day instead?" Mis' Winslow suggested with diplomacy.

  On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence.

  But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry window at the sparrows on the bird box.

  "It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to her, so."

  He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down t
he road to Ellen Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to informalities.

  Ellen was cleaning her silver. She had "six of each"—six knives, six forks, six spoons, all plated and seldom used, pewter with black handles serving for every day. The silver was cleaned often, though it was never on the table, save for company, and there never had been any company since Ellen had lost her little boy from fever. Having no articulateness and having no other outlet for emotion, she fed her grief by small abstentions: no guests, no diversions, no snatches of song about her work. Yet she was sane enough, and normal, only in dearth of sane and normal outlets for emotion, for energy, for personality, she had taken these strange directions for yet unharnessed forces.

  "Mercy," observed Mis' Winslow, warming her hands at the cooking stove, "you got more energy."

  "… than family, I guess you mean," Ellen Bourne finished. Ellen was little and fair, with slightly drooping head, and eyebrows curved to a childlike reflectiveness.

  "Well, I got consider'ble more family than I got energy," said Mis' Winslow, "so I guess we even it up. Seven-under-fifteen eats up energy like so much air."

  "Hey, king and country," said Ellen's old father, whittling by the fire, "you got family enough, Ellen. You got your hands full of us." He rubbed his hands through his thin upstanding silver hair on his little pink head, and his fine, pink face took on the look of father which rarely intruded, now, on his settled look of old man.

  "I donno what she'd do," said Ellen's mother, "with any more around here to pick up after. We're cluttered up enough, as it is." She was an old lady of whose outlines you took notice before your attention lay further upon her—angled waist, chin, lips, forehead, put on her a succession of zigzags. But her eyes were awake, and it was to be seen that she did not mean what she said and that she was looking anxiously at Ellen in the hope of having deceived her daughter. Ellen smiled at her brightly, and was not deceived.

  "I keep pretty busy," she said.

  Mis' Abby Winslow, who was not deceived either, hastened to the subject of Mary.

  "I should think Mary Chavah had enough to do, too," she said, "but she's going to take Lily's little boy. Had you heard?"

  "No," Ellen said, and stopped shaving silver polish.

  "He's coming in two weeks," Mis' Winslow imparted; "she told me so herself. She's got his room fixed up with owls on the wall paper. She's bought him a washbasin with a rim of puppies, and a red stocking cap. I saw her."

  "How old is he?" Ellen asked, and worked again.

  "I never thought to ask her," Mis' Winslow confessed; "he must be quite a little fellow. But he's coming alone from some place out West."

  "Hey, king and country," Ellen's father said; "I'd hate to have a boy come here, with my head the way it is."

  "And keeping the house all upset," Ellen's mother said, and asked Mis' Winslow some question about Mary; and when she turned to Ellen again, "Why, Ellen Bourne," she said, "you've shaved up every bit of that cleaning polish and we're most done cleaning."

  Ellen was looking at Mis' Winslow: "If you see her," Ellen said, "you ask her if I can't do anything to help."

  Later in the day, happening in at Mis' Mortimer Bates's, Mis' Winslow found Mis' Moran there before her, and asked what they had heard "about Mary Chavah." Something in that word "about" pricks curiosity its sharpest. "Have you heard about Mary Chavah?" "It's too bad about Mary Chavah." "Isn't it queer about Mary Chavah?"—each of these is like setting flame to an edge of tissue. Omit "about" from the language, and you abate most gossip. At Mis' Winslow's phrase, both women's eyebrows curved to another arc.

  Mis' Winslow told them.

  "Ain't that nice?" said Mis' Moran, wholeheartedly; "I couldn't bring up another, not with my back. But I'm glad Mary's going to know what it is… ."

  Mis' Mortimer Bates was glad, too, but being by nature a nonconformist, she took exception.

  "It's an awful undertaking for a single-handed woman," she observed.

  But this sort of thing she said almost unconsciously, and the other two women regarded it with no more alarm than any other reflex.

  "It's no worse starting single-handed than being left single-handed," offered Mis' Winslow somewhat ambiguously. "Lots does that's thrifty."

  "Seems as if we could do a little something to help her get ready, seem's though," Mis' Moran suggested; "I donno what."

  "I thought I'd slip over after supper and ask her," Mis' Winslow said; "maybe I'd best go now—and come back and tell you what she says."

  Mis' Winslow found Mary Chavah sitting by her pattern bookcase, cutting out a pattern. Mary's face was flushed and her eyes were bright, and she went on with her pattern, thrilled by it as by any other creating.

  "I just thought of this," Mary explained, looking vaguely at her visitor. "It come to me like a flash when I was working on Mis' Bates's basque. Will you wait just a minute, and then I'll explain it out to you."

  Without invitation, Mis' Winslow laid aside her coat and waited, watching Mary curiously. She was cutting and folding and pinning her tissue paper, oblivious of any presence. Alarm, suspense, doubt, solution, triumph, came and went, and neither woman was conscious that the flame of creation burned and breathed in the room as truly as if the product were to be acknowledged.

  "There!" Mary cried at last. "See it—can't you see it?—in gray wool?"

  It was the pattern for a boy's topcoat, cunningly cut in new lines of seam and revers, with a pocket, a bit of braid, a line of buttons laid in as delicately as the factors in any other good composition. Mis' Winslow inevitably recognized its utility, exclaimed, and wondered.

  "Mary Chavah! How did you know how to do things for children?"

  "How did you know how?" Mary inquired coolly.

  "Why, I've had 'em," Mis' Winslow offered simply.

  "Do you honestly think that makes any difference?" Mary asked.

  Mis' Winslow gasped, in the immemorial belief that the physical basis of motherhood is the guarantee of both spiritual and physical equipment.

  "Could you have cut out that coat?" Mary asked.

  Mis' Winslow shook her head. She was of those whose genius is for cutting over.

  "Well," said Mary, "I could. It ain't having 'em that teaches you to do for 'em. You either know how, or you don't know how. That's all."

  Mis' Winslow reflected that she could never make Mary understand—though any mother, she thought complacently, would know in a minute. The cutting of the coat did give her pause; but then, she summed it up, coat included, "Mary was queer"—and let it go at that.

  "I didn't know," Mis' Winslow said then, "but what I could help you some about the little boy's coming. Seven-under-fifteen does teach you something, you've got to allow. Mebbe I could tell you something, now and then. Or if we could do anything to help you get ready for him… ."

  "Oh," said Mary, in swift penitence, "thank you, Mis' Winslow. After he comes, maybe. But these things now I don't mind doing. The real nuisance'll come afterwards, I s'pose."

  Mis' Winslow smiled in soft triumph.

  "Nuisance!" she said. "That's what I meant comes to you by having 'em. You don't think so much of the nuisance part as you did before."

  "Then you don't look the thing in the face," said Mary, calmly. "That's all about that."

  "Well," Mis' Winslow said pacifically, "when's he coming?"

  "A week from Tuesday. A week from to-morrow," Mary told her.

  Mis' Winslow looked at her intently, with the light of calculation in her narrowed eyes.

  "A week from Tuesday," she said. "A week from Tuesday," she repeated. "A week from Tuesday!" she exclaimed. "Why, Mary Chavah. That's Christmas Eve."

  It was some matter of recipes that was absorbing Mis' Bates and Mis' Moran when Mis' Winslow breathlessly returned to them. They were deep in tradition, and in method, its buttonhole relation. During the weary period when nutrition has been one of the
two great problems the tremendous impulse that has nourished the world was alive in the faces of the two women, a kind of creative fire, such as had burned in Mary at the cutting of her pattern. Asparagus escalloped with toast crumbs and butter was for the moment symbol of all humanity's will to keep alive.

  "Ladies," said Mis' Winslow, with no other preface, "what do you think? Mary Chavah's little boy is coming from Idaho with a tag on, and when do you s'pose he's going to get here? Christmas Eve."

  "Christmas Eve," repeated Mis' Bates, whose mind never lightly forsook old ways or embraced a contretemps; "what a funny time to travel."

  "Likely catch the croup and be down sick on Mary's hands the first thing," said Mis' Moran. "It's a pity it ain't the Spring of the year."

  Mis' Winslow looked at them searchingly to see if her thought too far outdistanced theirs.

  "What struck me all of a heap," she said, "is his getting here then. That night. Christmas Eve."

  The three woman looked at one another.

  "That's so," Mis' Moran said.

  "Him—that child," Mis' Winslow put it, "getting here Christmas Eve, used to Christmas all his life, ten to one knowing in his head what he hopes he'll get. And no Christmas. And him with no mother. And her only a month or so dead."

  "Well," said Mis' Mortimer Bates, "it's too bad it's happened so. But it has happened so. You have to say that to your life quite often, I notice. I don't know anything to do but to say it now."

  Mis' Winslow had not taken off her cloak. She sat on the edge of her chair, with her hands deep in its pockets, her black knit "fascinator" fallen back from her hair. She was looking down at her cloth overshoes, and she went on speaking as if she had hardly heard what Mis' Bates had interposed.

  "He'll get in on the express," she said; "Mary said so. She don't have to go to the City to meet him. The man he travels with is going to put him on the train in the City. The little fellow'll get here after dark. After dark on Christmas Eve."

  "And no time for anybody to warn him that there won't be any Christmas waiting for him," Mis' Moran observed thoughtfully.