by A. A. Milne
Matthew, drying his ax blade, looked at it with one eye closed.
"Rabbit," he said.
"Where is it?" her father demanded.
"It was a young one—not as big as your fist," Ellen said. "I let it out before he got there. Where's mother?"
"Just because a thing's young, it ain't holy water," the old man complained. "Last time it was a squirrel you let go because it was young—it's like being spendthrift with manna… ." he went on.
Ellen's mother appeared, gave over to Ellen the supper preparations, contented herself with auxiliary offices of china and butter getting, and talked the while, pleased that she had something to disclose.
"Ben Helders stopped in," she told. "He's going to the City to-morrow. What do you s'pose after? A boy. He's going to take him to bring up and work on the farm."
"Where's he going to get the boy?" Ellen asked.
Her mother did not know, but Mrs. Helders was going to have a new diagonal and she wanted the number of Ellen's pattern. Ben would stop for it that night.
Evenings their kitchen was a sitting room, and when the supper had been cleared away and the red cotton spread covered the table, Ellen asked her husband to bring in the little tree. She found a cracker box, handily cut a hole with a cooking knife, and set up the little tree by the kitchen window.
"What under the canopy—" said her mother, her voice cracking.
"Oh, something to do in the evening," Ellen answered. "Father's going to pop me some corn to trim it with; aren't you, father? Mother, why don't you get you a good big darning needle and string what he pops?"
"It'll make a lot of litter," said her mother, but she brought the needle, for something to do.
"Hey, king and country," said her father; "I'd ought to have somebody here to shell it for me."
"Who you trimming up a tree for?" her mother demanded; "I thought they wasn't to be any in town this year."
"It ain't Christmas yet," Ellen said only. "I guess it won't do any hurt two days before."
While the two worked, Ellen went to the cupboard drawer, and from behind her pile of kitchen towels she drew out certain things: walnuts, wrapped in shining yeast tinsel and dangling from red yarn; wishbones tied with strips of bright cloth; a tiny box, made like a155 house, with rudely cut doors and windows; eggshells penciled as faces; a handful of peanut owls; a glass-stoppered bottle; a long necklace of buttonhole twist spools. A certain blue paper soldier doll that she had made was upstairs, but the other things she brought and fastened to the tree.
Her husband smoked and uneasily watched her. He saw somewhat within her plan, but he was not at home there. "If the boy hadlived and had been up-chamber asleep now," he thought once, "it'd be something like, to go trimming up a tree. But this way—"
"What you leaving the whole front of the tree bare for?" her mother asked.
"The blue paper soldier goes there. I want it should see the blue paper soldier first thing… ." Ellen said, and stopped abruptly.
"You talk like you was trimming the tree for somebody," her mother observed, aggrieved.
"Maybe something might look in the window—going by," Ellen said.
"Get in there! Get your heads in there, ye beggars!" said the old man to the popcorn. "I'd ought to have somebody here to pick up them shooting kernels," he complained.
In a little while, with flat-footed stamping, Ben Helders came in. When he had the pattern number, by laborious copying against the wall under the bracket lamp, Matthew said to him:—
"Going to get a boy to work out, are you?"
Helders laughed and shifted.
"He's going to work by and by," he said. "We allow to have him to ourselves a spell first."
"Keep him around the house till Spring?"
"More," said Helders. "You see," he added, "it's like this with us … family all gone, all married, and got their own. We figured to get hold of a little shaver and have some comfort with him before he goes to work, for life."
"Adopt him?" said Matthew, curiously.
"That's pretty near it," Helders admitted. "We've got one spoke for at the City Orphand Asylum."
Ellen Bourne turned. "How old?" she asked.
"Around five—six, we figure." Helders said it almost sheepishly.
Ellen stood facing the men, with the white festoons of popcorn in her hands.
"Matthew," she said, "let him bring us one."
Matthew stared. "You mean bring us a boy?" he asked.
"I don't care which—girl or boy. Anything young," Ellen said.
"Good Lord, Ellen," Matthew said, with high eyebrows, "ain't you got your hands full enough now?"
Ellen Bourne lifted her hands slightly and let them fall. "No," she answered.
The older woman looked at her daughter, and now first she was solicitous, as a mother.
"Ellen," she said, "you have, too, got your hands full. You're wore out all the time."
"That's it," Ellen said, "and I'm not wore out with the things I want to do."
"Hey, king and country!" the old man cried, upsetting the popper. "Don't get a child around here underfoot. I'm too old. I deserve grown folks. My head hurts me—"
"Matthew," said Ellen to her husband, "let Helders bring us one. To-morrow—for Christmas, Mat!"
Matthew looked slowly from side to side. It seemed incredible that so large a decision should lie with a man so ineffectual.
"'Seems like we'd ought to think about it a while first," he said weakly.
"Think about it!" said Ellen. "When haven't I thought about it? When have I thought about anything else but him we haven't got any more?"
"Ellen!" the mother mourned, "you don't know what you're taking on yourself—"
"Hush, mother," Ellen said gently; "you don't know what it is. You had me."
She faced Helders. "Will you bring two when you come back to-morrow night?" she said; "and one of them for us?"
Helders looked sidewise at Matthew, who was fumbling at his pipe.
"Wouldn't you want to see it first, now?" Helders temporized. "And a girl or a boy, now?"
"No—I wouldn't want to see it first—I couldn't bear to choose. One healthy—from healthy parents—and either girl or boy," Ellen said, and stopped. "The nicest tree thing I've made is for a boy," she owned. "It's a paper soldier… . I made these things for fun," she added to Helders.
For the first time Helders observed the tree. Then he looked in the woman's face. "I'll fetch out a boy for you if you say so," he said.
"Then do," she bade.
When the four were alone again, Mat sat looking at the floor. "Every headlong thing I've ever done I've gone headlong over," he said gloomily.
Ellen took a coin from the clock shelf. "When Ben goes past to-morrow," she merely said, "you'll likely see him. Have him get some little candles for the tree."
"My head hurts me," the old man gave out; "this ain't the place for a great noisy boy."
Ellen put her hand on his shoulder almost maternally.
"See, dear," she said, "then you'd be grandfather."
"Hey?" he said; "not if it was adopted, I wouldn't."
"Why, of course. That would make it ours—and yours. See," she cried, "you've been stringing popcorn for it already, and you didn't know!"
"Be grandfather, would I?" said the old man. "Would I? Hey, king and country! Grandfather again."
Ellen was moving about the kitchen lightly, with that manner, which eager interest brings, of leaving only half footprints.
"Come on, mother," she said, "we must get the popcorn strung for sure, now!"
The mother looked up at the tree. "Seems as if," she said, wrinkling her forehead, "I used to make pink tarleton stockings for your trees and fill 'em with the corn. I donno but I've got a little piece of pink tarleton somewheres in my bottom drawer… ."
… Next night they had the bracket lamp and the lamp on the shelf and the table hand lamp all burning. The little tree was gay with the white corn and the coloured trifles
. The kitchen seemed to be centering in the tree, as if the room had been concerned long enough with the doings of these grown folk and now were looking ahead to see who should come next. It was the high moment of immemorial expectancy, when those who are alive turn the head to see who shall come after.
"What you been making all day, daddy?" Ellen asked, tense at every sound from without.
Her father, neat in his best clothes, blew away a last plume of shaved wood and held out something.
"I just whittled out a kind of a clothespin man," he explained. "I made one for you, once, and you liked it like everything. Mebbe a boy won't?" he added doubtfully.
"Oh, but a boy will!" Ellen cried, and tied the doll above the blue paper soldier.
"Hadn't they ought to be here pretty soon?" Matthew asked nervously. "Where's mother?"
"She's watching from the front room window," Ellen answered.
Once more Helders came stamping on the kitchen porch, but this time there was a patter of other steps, and Ellen caught open the door before he summoned. Helders stepped into the room, and with him was a little boy.
"This one?" Ellen asked, her eyes alive with her eagerness.
But Helders shook his head.
"Mis' Bourne," he said, "I'm real dead sorry. They wa'n't but the one. Just the one we'd spoke for."
"One!" Ellen said; "you said Orphan Asylum."
"There's only the one," Helders repeated. "The others is little bits of babies, or else spoke for like ours—long ago. It seems they do that way. But I want you should do something: I want you and Matthew should take this one. Mother and I—are older … we ain't set store so much… ."
Ellen shook her head, and made him know, with what words she could find, that it could not be so. Then she knelt and touched at the coat of the child, a small frightened thing, with cap too large for him and one mitten lost. But he looked up brightly, and his eyes stayed on the Christmas tree. Ellen said little things to him, and went to take down for him some trifle from the tree.
"I'm just as much obliged," she said quietly to Helders. "I never thought of there not being enough. We'll wait."
Helders was fumbling for something.
"Here's your candles, I thought you might want them for somethin' else," he said, and turned to Matthew: "And here's your quarter. I didn't get the toy you mentioned. I thought you wouldn't want it, without the little kid."
Matthew looked swiftly at Ellen. He had not told her that he had sent by Helders for a toy. And at that Ellen crossed abruptly to her husband, and she was standing there as they let Helders out, with the little boy.
Ellen's father pounded his knee.
"But how long'll we have to wait? How long'll we have to wait?" he demanded shrilly. "King and country, why didn't somebody ask him that?"
Matthew tore open the door.
"Helders!" he shouted, "how long did they say we'd have to wait?"
"Mebbe only a week or two—mebbe longer," Helders' voice came out of the dark. "They couldn't tell me."
Ellen's mother stood fastening up a fallen tinsel walnut.
"Let's us leave the tree right where it is," she said. "Even with it here, we won't have enough Christmas to hurt anything."
Chapter 11
On that morning of the day before Christmas, Mary Chavah woke early, while it was yet dark. With closed eyes she lay, in the grip of a dream that was undissipated by her waking. In the dream she had seen a little town lying in a hollow, lighted and peopled, but without foundation.
"It isn't born yet," they told her, who looked with her, "and the people are not yet born."
"Who is the mother?" she had asked, as if everything must be born of woman.
"You," they had answered.
On which the town had swelled and rounded and swung in a hollow of cloud, globed and shining, like the world.
"You," they had kept on saying.
The sense that she must bear and mother the thing had grasped her with all the sickening force of dream fear. And when the dream slipped into the remembrance of what the day would bring her, the grotesque terror hardly lessened, and she woke to a sense of oppression and coming calamity such as not even her night of decision to take the child had brought to her, a weight as of physical faintness and sickness.
"I feel as if something was going to happen," she said, over and over.
She was wholly ignorant that in that week just passed the word had been liberated and had run round Old Trail Town in the happiest open secrecy:—
"… coming way from Idaho, with a tag on, Christmas Eve. We thought if everybody could call that night—just run into Mary's, you know, like it was any other night, and take in a little something to eat—no presents, you know … oh, of course, no presents! Just supper, in a basket. We'd all have to eat some-where. It won't be any Christmas celebration, of course—oh, no, not with the paper signed and all. But just for us to kind of meet and be there, when he gets off the train from Idaho."
"Just … like it was any other night." That was the part that abated suspicion. Indeed, that had been the very theory on which the nonobservance of Christmas had been based: the day was to be treated like any other day. And, obviously, on any other day such a simple plan as this for the welcoming of a little stranger from Idaho would have gone forward as a matter of course. Why deny him this, merely because the night of his arrival chanced to be Christmas Eve? When Christmas was to be treated exactly as any other day?
If, in the heart of Mis' Abby Winslow, where the plan had originated, it had originated side by side with the thought that the point of the plan was the incidence of Christmas Eve, she kept her belief secret. The open argument was unassailable, and she contented herself with that. Even Simeon Buck, confronted with it, was silent.
"Goin' back on the paper, are you?" he had at first said, "and hev a celebration?"
"Celebration of what?" Mis' Winslow demanded; "celebration of that little boy getting here all alone, 'way from Idaho. And we'd celebrate that any other night, wouldn't we? Of course we would. Our paper signing don't call for us to give everybody the cold shoulder as I know of, just because it's Christmas or Christmas Eve, either."
"No," Simeon owned, "of course it don't. Of course it don't."
As for Abel Ames, he accepted the proposal with an alacrity which he was put to it to conceal.
"So do," he said heartily, "so do. I guess we can go ahead just like it was a plain day o' the week, can't we?"
"Hetty," he said to his wife, whom that noon he went through the house to the kitchen expressly to tell, "can you bake up a basket of stuff to take over to Mary Chavah's next Tuesday night?"
She looked up from the loaf she was cutting, the habitual wonder of her childish curved lashes accented by her sudden curving of eyebrows.
"Next Tuesday?" she said, "Why, that's Christmas eve!"
Abel explained, saying, "What of that?" and trying to speak indifferently but, in spite of himself, shining through.
"Well, that's kind of nice to do, ain't it?" she answered.
"My, yes," Abel said, emphatically, "It's a thing to do—that's the thing to do."
It was Mis' Mortimer Bates, the nonconformist by nature, in whom doubts came nearest to expression.
"I don't know," she said, "it kind of does seem like hedging."
"They ain't anybody for it to seem to," Mis' Winslow contended reasonably, "but us. And we understand."
"We was going to do entirely without a Christmas this year. Entirely without," Mis' Bates rehearsed.
"Was we going to do entirely without everyday, week-day, year-in-and-year-out milk of human kindness?" Mis' Winslow demanded. "Well, then, let's us use a little of it, same as we would on a Monday wash day."
No voice was raised in real protest. None who had signed the paper and none who had not done so could take exception to this simple way of hospitality to the little stranger with a tag on. And it was the glory of the little town being a little town that they somehow let it be known that every
one was expected to look in at Mary's that night. No one was uninvited. And this was like a part of the midwinter mystery expressing itself unbidden.
Mary alone was not told. She had consistently objected to the Christmas observances for so long that they feared the tyranny of her custom. "She might not let us do it," they said, "but if we all get there, she can't help liking it. She would on any other day… ."
… So she alone in Old Trail Town woke that morning before Christmas with no knowledge of this that was afoot. And yet the day was not like any other day, because she lay there dreading it more.
She had cleared out her little sleeping room, as she had cleared the lower floor. The chamber, with its white-plastered walls, and boards nearly bare, and narrow white bed, had the look of a cell, in the first light struggling through the single snow-framed window. Here, since her childhood she had lain nightly; here she had brought her thought of Adam Blood, and had seen the thought die and had watched with it; here she had lain on the nights after her parents had died; here she had rested, body-sick with fatigue, in the years that she had toiled to keep her home. In all that time there had gone on within her many kinds of death. She had arrived somehow at a dumb feeling that these dyings were gradually uncovering her self from somewhere within; rather, uncovering some self whose existence she only dimly guessed. "They's two of me," she had thought more often of late "and we don't meet—we don't meet." She lived among her neighbors without hate, without malice; for years she had "meant nothing but love"—and this not negatively. The rebellion against Christmas was against only the falsity of its meaningless observance. The rebellion against taking the child, though somewhat grounded in her distrust of her own fitness, was really the last vestige of a self that had clung to her, in bitterness not toward Adam, but toward Lily. Ever since she had known that the child was coming she had felt a kind of spiritual exhaustion, sharpened by the strange sense of oppression that hung upon her like an illness.
"I feel as if something was going to happen," she kept saying.
In a little while she leaned toward the window at her bed's head, and looked down the hill toward Jenny's. Her heart throbbed when she saw a light there. Of late, when she had waked in the night, she had always looked, but always until now the little house had been wrapped in the darkness. Because of that light, she could not sleep again, and so presently she rose, and in the sharp chill of the room, bathed and dressed, though what had once been her savage satisfaction in braving the cold had long since become mere undramatic ability to endure it without thinking. With Mary, life and all its constructive rites had won what the sacrificial has never been able to achieve—the soul of the casual, of, so to say, second nature, which is last nature, and nature triumphant.