The Christmas Megapack

by Reginald Robert

  As Van Landing listened a sudden impulse to take the children in and get for them the things they wanted came over him; then he walked away. If only he could find Carmencita and let her do the buying. Was Christmas like this every year? These children with no chance—was there no one to give them their share of childhood’s rights? Settlement workers, churches, schools, charity associations—things of that sort doubtless saw to them. It was not his business. But wasn’t it his business? Could it possibly be his business to know—and care?

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  Van Landing looked up. A tall, slender man in working-clothes, a basket on one arm, his wife holding to the other, tried to touch his hat. “The crowd makes walking hard without pushing. I hope I didn’t step on your foot.”

  “Didn’t touch it.” The man had on no overcoat, and his hands were red and chapped. He was much too thin for his height, and as he coughed Van Landing understood. “Shopping, I suppose?”

  Why he asked he did not know, and it was the wife he asked, the young wife whose timid clutch of her husband’s arm was very unlike the manner of most of the women he had passed. She looked up.

  “We were afraid to wait until tomorrow, it’s snowing so hard. We might not be able to get out, and the children—”

  “We’ve got three kiddies home.” The man’s thin face brightened, and he rubbed his coat sleeve across his mouth to check his cough. “Santa Claus is sure enough to them, and we don’t want ’em to know different till we have to. A merry Christmas, sir!”

  As they went on Van Landing turned and looked. They were poor people. But were they quite so poor as he? He had seen many for whom he might have made Christmas had he known in time—might have saved the sacrifices that had to be made; but would it then have been Christmas? Slowly, very slowly, in the shabby street and snow-filled air, an understanding of things but dimly glimpsed before was coming to him, and he was seeing what for long had been unseen.

  CHAPTER IX

  “Think hard, Father—oh, please think hard! It was Van—Van—” Carmencita, hands clutched tightly behind her back, leaned forward on her tiptoes and anxiously peered into her father’s face for sign of dawning memory. “If I hadn’t been so Christmas-crazy I’d have listened better, but I wasn’t thinking about his name. Can’t you—can’t you remember the last part? It was Van—Van—”

  Slowly her father shook his head. “I wish I could, Carmencita. I don’t hear well of late and I didn’t catch his name. You called him Mr. Van.”

  “I called him that for short. I’m a cutting-down person even in names.” The palms of Carmencita’s hands came together and her fingers interlocked. “If I’d had more sense and manners I’d have called his name right from the first, and we wouldn’t have lost him. I could have found him today if I’d known what to look for in the telephone-book, or if Miss Frances had been at Mother McNeil’s. She might as well be lost, too, but she’ll be back at seven, and that’s why I am going now, so as to be there the minute she gets in, to ask her what his—”

  “She might not like your asking, Carmencita. You must be careful, child. Miss Barbour is not a lady one can—”

  “Not a lady one can what?” Carmencita stopped her nervous swaying, and the big blue eyes looked questioningly at her father. “Was there ever a lady who didn’t want to find her lost lover if he was looking for her? That’s what he is. And she wants to find him, if she don’t know it exactly. She’s working it off down here with us children, but she’s got something on her mind. He’s it. We’ve got to find him, Father—got to!”

  With a dexterous movement of her fingers Carmencita fastened the buttons of her coat and pulled her hat down on her head. “I’m going back to Mother McNeil’s,” she said, presently, and the large and half-worn rubbers which she had tied on over her shoes were looked at speculatively. “The Damanarkist is going to take me. As soon as Miss Frances tells me Mr. Van’s name I’ll telephone him to come quick, but I won’t tell her that. She might go away again. In that slushy book I read the girl ought to have been shook. She was dying dead in love with her sweetheart and treated him like he was a poodle-dog. Miss Frances wouldn’t do that, but I don’t know what she might do, and I’m not going to tell her any more than I can help. I want her to think it just happened. Good-by, and go to sleep if you want to, but don’t smoke, please. You might drop the sparks on your coat. Good-by.”

  With a swift kiss she was gone and, meeting the Damanarkist, who was waiting outside the door, they went down the three flights of steps and out into the street. The wind was biting, and, turning up the collar of her coat, Carmencita put her hands in her pockets and made effort to walk rapidly through the thick snow into which her feet sank with each step. For some minutes conversation was impossible. Heads ducked to keep out of their faces the fast-falling flakes, they trudged along in silence until within a few doors of Mother McNeil’s house, and then Carmencita looked up.

  “Do—do you ever pray, Mr. Leimberg—pray hard, I mean?”

  “Pray!” The Damanarkist drew in his breath and laughed with smothered scorn. “Pray! Why should I pray? I cut out prayer when I was a kid. No, I don’t pray.”

  “It’s a great comfort, praying is.” Carmencita’s hand was taken out of her pocket and slipped through the arm of her disillusioned friend. “Sometimes you’re just bound to pray. It’s like breathing—you can’t help it. It—it just rises up. I prayed yesterday for—for something, and it pretty near happened, but—”

  “And you think your praying helped to make it happen!” Mr. Leimberg drew Carmencita’s hand farther through his arm, and his lips twisted in contemptuous pity. “You think there is a magician up—oh, somewhere, who makes things happen, do you? Think—”

  “Yes.” Carmencita’s feet skipped in spite of the clogging snow. “I think that somewhere there is Somebody who knows about everything, but I don’t think He means us to ask for anything we want just because we want it and don’t do a lick to get it. I’ve been praying for months and months about my temper and stamping my foot when I get mad, and if I remember in time and hold down the up-comings my prayers are always answered; but when I let go and forget—” Carmencita whistled a long, low, significant note. “I guess then I don’t want to be answered. I want to smash something. But I didn’t pray yesterday about tempers and stamping. It was pretty near a miracle that I asked for, though I said I wasn’t asking for miracles or—”

  “All people who pray ask for miracles. Since the days when men feared floods and famines and pestilence and evil spirits they have cried out for protection and propitiated what to them were gods.” The Damanarkist spit upon the ground as if to spew contempt of pretense and cupidity. “I’ve no patience with it. If there is a God, He knows the cursed struggle life is with most of us; and if there isn’t, prayer is but a waste of time.”

  Carmencita lifted her eyes and for a moment looked in the dark, thin face, embittered by the losing battle of life, as if she had not heard aright, then she laughed softly.

  “If I didn’t know you, dear Mr. Damanarkist, I’d think you really meant it—what you said. And you don’t. I don’t guess there’s anybody in all the world who doesn’t pray sometimes. Something in you does it by itself, and you can’t keep it back. You just wait until you feel all lost and lonely and afraid, or so glad you are ready to sing out loud, then you’ll do it—inside, if you don’t speak out. If I prayed harder to have more sense and not talk so much, and not say what I think about people, and not hate my ugly clothes so, and despise the smell of onions and cabbage and soap-suds, I might get more answers, but you can’t get answers just by praying. You’ve got to work like the mischief, and be a regular policeman over yourself and nab the bad things the minute they poke their heads out. If I’d prayed differently yesterday I wouldn’t have been looking for—for somebody all today, and be a jumping-jack tonight for fear I won’t find him. Did—did you ever have a sweetheart, Mr. Damanarkist?” Before answer could be made Mother McNeil’s
house was reached, and with steps that were leaps Carmencita was at the door, and a moment later inside. Finding that Miss Frances had returned, she called to Mr. Leimberg to come for her on his way back from the station library where he was to get his book, and breathlessly she ran to Miss Barbour’s door and knocked violently upon it.

  To the “come in” she entered, eyes big and shining, and cheeks stung into color by the bitter wind; and with a rush forward the hands of her adored friend were caught and held with a tight and nervous grip.

  “Miss Frances! Miss Frances!”

  Two arms were flung around Miss Barbour’s waist, and for a moment the curly brown head was buried on her breast and words refused to come; instead came breathing short and quick; then Carmencita looked up.

  “What—oh, what is his name, Miss Frances? He was found and now is lost, and I promised—I promised I’d get you for him!”

  Frances Barbour lifted the excited little face and kissed it. “What’s the matter, Carmencita? You look as if you’d seen a ghost, and you’re talking as if—”

  “I’m crazy—I’m not. And there isn’t any time to lose. He said he must find you before Christmas. There isn’t a soul to make Christmas for him, and he hasn’t anybody to buy things for, and he’s as lonely as a—a desert person, and he doesn’t want any one but you. Oh, Miss Frances, what is his name?”

  Frances Barbour leaned back in the chair in which she had taken her seat, and her face whitened. “What are you talking about, and who is—”

  “I’m talking about—Him.” On her knees Carmencita crouched against her friend’s chair, and her long, slender fingers intertwined with those which had suddenly grown nerveless. “I’m talking about your sweetheart, Miss Frances. I found him for you, and then I lost him. I’ll tell you how it happened after I know all of his name and—If you had seen his face when I told him I knew you and knew where you lived you’d hurry, you’d—”

  “If he wishes to see me, why doesn’t he—I mean—” Sudden color surged into the face turned from the child’s eager eyes. “What are we talking about, Carmencita? There is evidently some mistake.”

  “There is. An awful one. It’s three years old. And we’re talking about the gentleman Father and I met yesterday and lost last night. You’re his sweetheart, and he wants you for Christmas and for ever after, and he may be dead by tomorrow if he doesn’t find you. He came to our house, and I wrote you a note to come, too, and when you didn’t do it he looked as if he’d been hit in the face and couldn’t breathe good, and he stumbled down the steps like a blind man, and we’d forgot to tell him our name, and he didn’t know the number of our house, and—” She paused for breath and brushed back the curls from her face. “I know he’s been looking all day. Where does he live, Miss Frances, and what is his name?”

  “If you will tell me of whom you are talking I will tell you whether or not I know him. Until you do—”

  “I told you I didn’t remember any of his name but the Van part. Don’t you know the name of the person you love best on earth? It’s his name I want.”

  Frances Barbour got up and walked over to the bureau and opened its top drawer. “You are asking questions that in any one else I would not permit, Carmencita. I am sure you do not mean to be—”

  “I don’t mean anything but that I want to know all of Mr. Van’s name, and if you don’t tell me you are not a Christian!”

  With a change of expression Carmencita sprang to her feet and, hands clasped behind her back, she stood erect, her eyes blazing with indignation. “If you don’t tell him where you are, don’t let him come, I’ll think it’s all just make-believe and put on, your coming and doing for people you don’t really and truly know, and doing nothing for those you do, and letting the ones you love best be lonely and miserable and having Christmas all by themselves when they’re starving hungry for you. What is his name?” Carmencita’s voice was high and shrill, and her foot was stamped vehemently. “What is his name?”

  “Stephen Van Landing.”

  Face to face, Frances Barbour and Carmencita looked into each other’s eyes, then with a leap Carmencita was out of the room and down the steps and at the telephone. With hands that trembled she turned the pages of the book she was holding upside down, then with disgust at her stupidity she righted it and ran her finger down the long line of V’s. Finding at last the name she wanted, she called the number, then closed her eyes and prayed fervently, feverishly, and half-aloud the words came jerkily:

  “O God, please let him be home, and let him get down here quick before Miss Frances goes out. She and Mother McNeil are going somewhere and won’t be back until eleven, and that would be too late for him to come, and—Hello!” The receiver was jammed closer to her ear. “Is that Mr. Van Landing’s house? Is he home? He—he—isn’t home!” The words came in a little wail. “Oh, he must be home! Are you sure—sure? Where can I get him? Where is he? You don’t know—hasn’t been at the office all day and hasn’t telephoned? He’s looking—I mean I guess he’s, trying to find somebody. Who is this talking? It’s—it’s a friend of his, and tell him the minute he comes in to call up Pelham 4293 and ask for Miss Frances Barbour, who wants to talk to him. And listen. Tell him if she’s out to come to 14 Custer Street, to Mother McNeil’s, and wait until she gets home. Write it down. Got it? Yes, that’s it. Welcome. Good-by.”

  The receiver was hung upon its hook, and for a moment Carmencita stared at the wall; then her face sobered. The strain and tension of the day gave way, and the high hopes of the night before went out as at the snuffing of a candle. Presently she nodded into space.

  “I stamped my foot at Miss Frances. Stamped my foot! And I got mad, and was impertinent, and talked like a gutter girl to a sure-enough lady. Talked like—”

  Her teeth came down on her lips to stop their sudden quivering, and the picture on the wall grew blurred and indistinct.

  “There isn’t any use in praying.” Two big tears rolled down her cheeks and fell upon her hands. “I might as well give up.”

  CHAPTER X

  For a half-moment after Carmencita left the room Frances Barbour stood in the middle of the floor and stared at the door, still open, then went over and closed it. Coming back to the table at which she had been writing, she sat down and took up her pen and made large circles on the sheet of paper before her. Slowly the color in her face cooled and left it white.

  Carmencita was by nature cyclonic. Her buoyancy and bubbling spirits, her enthusiasms and intensities, were well understood, but how could she possibly know Stephen Van Landing? All day he had been strangely on her mind, always he was in her heart, but thought of him was forced to be subconscious, for none other was allowed. Of late, however, crowd it back as she would, a haunting sense of his presence had been with her, and under the busy and absorbed air with which she had gone about the day’s demands there had been sharp surge of unpermitted memories of which she was impatient and ashamed.

  Also there had been disquieting questions, questions to which she had long refused to listen, and in the crush and crowd they had pursued her, peered at her in unexpected places, and faced her in the quiet of her room, and from them she was making effort to escape when Carmencita burst in upon her. The latter was too excited, too full of some new adventure, to talk clearly or coherently. Always Carmencita was adventuring, but what could she mean by demanding to know the name of her sweetheart, and by saying she had found him and then lost him? And why had she, Frances Barbour, told her as obediently as if their positions were reversed and she the child instead of Carmencita?

  Elbow on the table and chin in the palm of her hand, she tapped the desk-pad with her pen and made small dots in the large circles she had drawn on the paper, and slowly she wrote a name upon it.

  What could Stephen Van Landing be doing in this part of the town? He was one of the city’s successful men, but he did not know his city. Disagreeable sights and sounds had by him been hitherto avoided, and in this section they were chiefly what wa
s found. Why should he have come to it? That he was selfish and absorbed in his own affairs, that he was conventional and tradition—trained, was as true today, perhaps, as when she had told him so three years ago, but had they taught him nothing, these three years that were past? Did he still think, still believe—

  With a restless movement she turned in her chair, and her hands twisted in her lap. Was she not still as stubborn as of old, still as proud and impatient of restraint where her sense of freedom and independence of action were in question, still as self-willed? And was it true, what Carmencita had said—was she giving herself to others and refusing herself to the only one who had the right to claim her, the royal right of love?

  But how did she know he still needed her, wanted her? When she had returned to her own city after long absence she had told of her present place of residence to but few of her old friends. Her own sorrow, her own sudden facing of the inevitable and unescapable, had brought her sharply to a realization of how little she was doing with the time that was hers, and she had been honest and sincere when she had come to Mother McNeil’s and asked to be shown the side of life she had hitherto known but little—the sordid, sinful, struggling side in which children especially had so small a chance. In these years of absence he had made no sign. Even if it were true, what Carmencita had said, that he—that is, a man named Van Something—was looking for her, until he found her she could not tell him where she was.

  She had not wished her friends to know. Settlements and society were as oil and water, and for the present the work she had undertaken needed all her time and thought. If only people knew, if only people understood, the things that she now knew and had come to understand, the inequalities and injustices of life would no longer sting and darken and embitter as they stung and darkened and embittered now, and if she and Stephen could work together—

  He was living in the same place, his offices were in the same place, and he worked relentlessly, she was told. Although he did not know she was in the city, she knew much of him, knew of his practical withdrawal from the old life, knew of a certain cynicism that was becoming settled; and a thousand times she had blamed herself for the unhappiness that was his as well as hers. She loved her work, would always be glad that she had lived among the people who were so singularly like those other people who thought themselves so different, but if he still needed her, wanted her, was it not her duty—