“It was so funny to see the postman when he came this evening,” said Olive. “He just bulged with parcels. They were sticking out in every direction.”
“We all got our share of them,” said Jean with a sigh of content.
“Even the cook got six—I counted.”
“Miss Allen didn’t get a thing—not even a letter,” said Beth quickly. Beth had a trick of seeing things that other girls didn’t.
“I forgot Miss Allen. No, I don’t believe she did,” answered Jean thoughtfully as she twisted up her pretty hair. “How dismal it must be to be so forlorn as that on Christmas Eve of all times. Ugh! I’m glad I have friends.”
“I saw Miss Allen watching us as we opened our parcels and letters,” Beth went on. “I happened to look up once, and such an expression as was on her face, girls! It was pathetic and sad and envious all at once. It really made me feel bad—for five minutes,” she concluded honestly.
“Hasn’t Miss Allen any friends at all?” asked Beth.
“No, I don’t think she has,” answered Jean. “She has lived here for fourteen years, so Mrs. Pickrell says. Think of that, girls! Fourteen years at Chestnut Terrace! Is it any wonder that she is thin and dried-up and snappy?”
“Nobody ever comes to see her and she never goes anywhere,” said Beth. “Dear me! She must feel lonely now when everybody else is being remembered by their friends. I can’t forget her face tonight; it actually haunts me. Girls, how would you feel if you hadn’t anyone belonging to you, and if nobody thought about you at Christmas?”
“Ow!” said Olive, as if the mere idea made her shiver.
A little silence followed. To tell the truth, none of them liked Miss Allen. They knew that she did not like them either, but considered them frivolous and pert, and complained when they made a racket.
“The skeleton at the feast,” Jean called her, and certainly the presence of the pale, silent, discontented-looking woman at the No. 16 table did not tend to heighten its festivity.
Presently Jean said with a dramatic flourish, “Girls, I have an inspiration—a Christmas inspiration!”
“What is it?” cried four voices.
“Just this. Let us give Miss Allen a Christmas surprise. She has not received a single present and I’m sure she feels lonely. Just think how we would feel if we were in her place.”
“That is true,” said Olive thoughtfully. “Do you know, girls, this evening I went to her room with a message from Mrs. Pickrell, and I do believe she had been crying. Her room looked dreadfully bare and cheerless, too. I think she is very poor. What are we to do, Jean?”
“Let us each give her something nice. We can put the things just outside of her door so that she will see them whenever she opens it. I’ll give her some of Fred’s roses too, and I’ll write a Christmassy letter in my very best style to go with them,” said Jean, warming up to her ideas as she talked.
The other girls caught her spirit and entered into the plan with enthusiasm.
“Splendid!” cried Beth. “Jean, it is an inspiration, sure enough. Haven’t we been horribly selfish—thinking of nothing but our own gifts and fun and pleasure? I really feel ashamed.”
“Let us do the thing up the very best way we can,” said Nellie, forgetting even her beloved chocolates in her eagerness. “The shops are open yet. Let us go up town and invest.”
Five minutes later five capped and jacketed figures were scurrying up the street in the frosty, starlit December dusk. Miss Allen in her cold little room heard their gay voices and sighed. She was crying by herself in the dark. It was Christmas for everybody but her, she thought drearily.
In an hour the girls came back with their purchases.
“Now, let’s hold a council of war,” said Jean jubilantly. “I hadn’t the faintest idea what Miss Allen would like so I just guessed wildly. I got her a lace handkerchief and a big bottle of perfume and a painted photograph frame—and I’ll stick my own photo in it for fun. That was really all I could afford. Christmas purchases have left my purse dreadfully lean.”
“I got her a glove-box and a pin tray,” said Belle, “and Olive got her a calendar and Whittier’s poems. And besides we are going to give her half of that big plummy fruit cake Mother sent us from home. I’m sure she hasn’t tasted anything so delicious for years, for fruit cakes don’t grow on Chestnut Terrace and she never goes anywhere else for a meal.”
Beth had bought a pretty cup and saucer and said she meant to give one of her pretty water-colours too. Nellie, true to her reputation, had invested in a big box of chocolate creams, a gorgeously striped candy cane, a bag of oranges, and a brilliant lampshade of rose-coloured crepe paper to top off with.
“It makes such a lot of show for the money,” she explained. “I am bankrupt, like Jean.”
“Well, we’ve got a lot of pretty things,” said Jean in a tone of satisfaction. “Now we must do them up nicely. Will you wrap them in tissue paper, girls, and tie them with baby ribbon—here’s a box of it—while I write that letter?”
While the others chatted over their parcels Jean wrote her letter, and Jean could write delightful letters. She had a decided talent in that respect, and her correspondents all declared her letters to be things of beauty and joy forever. She put her best into Miss Allen’s Christmas letter. Since then she has written many bright and clever things, but I do not believe she ever in her life wrote anything more genuinely original and delightful than that letter. Besides, it breathed the very spirit of Christmas, and all the girls declared that it was splendid.
“You must all sign it now,” said Jean, “and I’ll put it in one of those big envelopes; and, Nellie, won’t you write her name on it in fancy letters?”
Which Nellie proceeded to do, and furthermore embellished the envelope by a border of chubby cherubs, dancing hand in hand around it and a sketch of No. 16 Chestnut Terrace in the corner in lieu of a stamp. Not content with this she hunted out a huge sheet of drawing paper and drew upon it an original pen-and-ink design after her own heart. A dudish cat—Miss Allen was fond of the No. 16 cat if she could be said to be fond of anything—was portrayed seated on a rocker arrayed in smoking jacket and cap with a cigar waved airily aloft in one paw while the other held out a placard bearing the legend “Merry Christmas.” A second cat in full street costume bowed politely, hat in paw, and waved a banner inscribed with “Happy New Year,” while faintly suggested kittens gambolled around the border. The girls laughed until they cried over it and voted it to be the best thing Nellie had yet done in original work.
All this had taken time and it was past eleven o’clock. Miss Allen had cried herself to sleep long ago and everybody else in Chestnut Terrace was abed when five figures cautiously crept down the hall, headed by Jean with a dim lamp. Outside of Miss Allen’s door the procession halted and the girls silently arranged their gifts on the floor.
“That’s done,” whispered Jean in a tone of satisfaction as they tiptoed back. “And now let us go to bed or Mrs. Pickrell, bless her heart, will be down on us for burning so much midnight oil. Oil has gone up, you know, girls.”
It was in the early morning that Miss Allen opened her door. But early as it was, another door down the hall was half open too and five rosy faces were peering cautiously out. The girls had been up for an hour for fear they would miss the sight and were all in Nellie’s room, which commanded a view of Miss Allen’s door.
That lady’s face was a study. Amazement, incredulity, wonder, chased each other over it, succeeded by a glow of pleasure. On the floor before her was a snug little pyramid of parcels topped by Jean’s letter. On a chair behind it was a bowl of delicious hot-house roses and Nellie’s placard.
Miss Allen looked down the hall but saw nothing, for Jean had slammed the door just in time. Half an hour later when they were going down to breakfast Miss Allen came along the hall with outstretched hands to meet them. She had been crying again, but I think her tears were happy ones; and she was smiling now. A cluster of Jean’s roses
were pinned on her breast.
“Oh, girls, girls,” she said, with a little tremble in her voice, “I can never thank you enough. It was so kind and sweet of you. You don’t know how much good you have done me.”
Breakfast was an unusually cheerful affair at No. 16 that morning. There was no skeleton at the feast and everybody was beaming. Miss Allen laughed and talked like a girl herself.
“Oh, how surprised I was!” she said. “The roses were like a bit of summer, and those cats of Nellie’s were so funny and delightful. And your letter too, Jean! I cried and laughed over it. I shall read it every day for a year.”
After breakfast everyone went to Christmas service. The girls went uptown to the church they attended. The city was very beautiful in the morning sunshine. There had been a white frost in the night and the tree-lined avenues and public squares seemed like glimpses of fairyland.
“How lovely the world is,” said Jean.
“This is really the very happiest Christmas morning I have ever known,” declared Nellie. “I never felt so really Christmassy in my inmost soul before.”
“I suppose,” said Beth thoughtfully, “that it is because we have discovered for ourselves the old truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive. I’ve always known it, in a way, but I never realized it before.”
“Blessing on Jean’s Christmas inspiration,” said Nellie. “But, girls, let us try to make it an all-the-year-round inspiration, I say. We can bring a little of our own sunshine into Miss Allen’s life as long as we live with her.”
“Amen to that!” said Jean heartily. “Oh, listen, girls—the Christmas chimes!”
And over all the beautiful city was wafted the grand old message of peace on earth and good will to all the world.
A CHRISTMAS MISTAKE
“Tomorrow is Christmas,” announced Teddy Grant exultantly, as he sat on the floor struggling manfully with a refractory bootlace that was knotted and tagless and stubbornly refused to go into the eyelets of Teddy’s patched boots. “Ain’t I glad, though. Hurrah!”
His mother was washing the breakfast dishes in a dreary, listless sort of way. She looked tired and broken-spirited. Ted’s enthusiasm seemed to grate on her, for she answered sharply:
“Christmas, indeed. I can’t see that it is anything for us to rejoice over. Other people may be glad enough, but what with winter coming on I’d sooner it was spring than Christmas. Mary Alice, do lift that child out of the ashes and put its shoes and stockings on. Everything seems to be at sixes and sevens here this morning.”
Keith, the oldest boy, was coiled up on the sofa calmly working out some algebra problems, quite oblivious to the noise around him. But he looked up from his slate, with his pencil suspended above an obstinate equation, to declaim with a flourish:
“Christmas comes but once a year,
And then Mother wishes it wasn’t here.”
“I don’t, then,” said Gordon, son number two, who was preparing his own noon lunch of bread and molasses at the table, and making an atrocious mess of crumbs and sugary syrup over everything. “I know one thing to be thankful for, and that is that there’ll be no school. We’ll have a whole week of holidays.”
Gordon was noted for his aversion to school and his affection for holidays.
“And we’re going to have turkey for dinner,” declared Teddy, getting up off the floor and rushing to secure his share of bread and molasses, “and cranb’ry sauce and—and—pound cake! Ain’t we, Ma?”
“No, you are not,” said Mrs. Grant desperately, dropping the dishcloth and snatching the baby on her knee to wipe the crust of cinders and molasses from the chubby pink-and-white face. “You may as well know it now, children, I’ve kept it from you so far in hopes that something would turn up, but nothing has. We can’t have any Christmas dinner tomorrow—we can’t afford it. I’ve pinched and saved every way I could for the last month, hoping that I’d be able to get a turkey for you anyhow, but you’ll have to do without it. There’s that doctor’s bill to pay and a dozen other bills coming in—and people say they can’t wait. I suppose they can’t, but it’s kind of hard, I must say.”
The little Grants stood with open mouths and horrified eyes. No turkey for Christmas! Was the world coming to an end? Wouldn’t the government interfere if anyone ventured to dispense with a Christmas celebration?
The gluttonous Teddy stuffed his fists into his eyes and lifted up his voice. Keith, who understood better than the others the look on his mother’s face, took his blubbering young brother by the collar and marched him into the porch. The twins, seeing the summary proceeding, swallowed the outcries they had intended to make, although they couldn’t keep a few big tears from running down their fat cheeks.
Mrs. Grant looked pityingly at the disappointed faces about her.
“Don’t cry, children, you make me feel worse. We are not the only ones who will have to do without a Christmas turkey. We ought to be very thankful that we have anything to eat at all. I hate to disappoint you, but it can’t be helped.”
“Never mind, Mother,” said Keith, comfortingly, relaxing his hold upon the porch door, whereupon it suddenly flew open and precipitated Teddy, who had been tugging at the handle, heels over head backwards. “We know you’ve done your best. It’s been a hard year for you. Just wait, though. I’ll soon be grown up, and then you and these greedy youngsters shall feast on turkey every day of the year. Hello, Teddy, have you got on your feet again? Mind, sir, no more blubbering!”
“When I’m a man,” announced Teddy with dignity, “I’d just like to see you put me in the porch. And I mean to have turkey all the time and I won’t give you any, either.”
“All right, you greedy small boy. Only take yourself off to school now, and let us hear no more squeaks out of you. Tramp, all of you, and give Mother a chance to get her work done.”
Mrs. Grant got up and fell to work at her dishes with a brighter face.
“Well, we mustn’t give in; perhaps things will be better after a while. I’ll make a famous bread pudding, and you can boil some molasses taffy and ask those little Smithsons next door to help you pull it. They won’t whine for turkey, I’ll be bound. I don’t suppose they ever tasted such a thing in all their lives. If I could afford it, I’d have had them all in to dinner with us. That sermon Mr. Evans preached last Sunday kind of stirred me up. He said we ought always to try and share our Christmas joy with some poor souls who had never learned the meaning of the word. I can’t do as much as I’d like to. It was different when your father was alive.”
The noisy group grew silent as they always did when their father was spoken of. He had died the year before, and since his death the little family had had a hard time. Keith, to hide his feelings, began to hector the rest.
“Mary Alice, do hurry up. Here, you twin nuisances, get off to school. If you don’t you’ll be late and then the master will give you a whipping.”
“He won’t,” answered the irrepressible Teddy. “He never whips us, he doesn’t. He stands us on the floor sometimes, though,” he added, remembering the many times his own chubby legs had been seen to better advantage on the school platform.
“That man,” said Mrs. Grant, alluding to the teacher, “makes me nervous. He is the most abstracted creature I ever saw in my life. It is a wonder to me he doesn’t walk straight into the river some day. You’ll meet him meandering along the street, gazing into vacancy, and he’ll never see you nor hear a word you say half the time.”
“Yesterday,” said Gordon, chuckling over the remembrance, “he came in with a big piece of paper he’d picked up on the entry floor in one hand and his hat in the other—and he stuffed his hat into the coal-scuttle and hung up the paper on a nail as grave as you please. Never knew the difference till Ned Slocum went and told him. He’s always doing things like that.”
Keith had collected his books and now marched his brothers and sisters off to school. Left alone with the baby, Mrs. Grant betook herself to her work with a heavy
heart. But a second interruption broke the progress of her dish-washing.
“I declare,” she said, with a surprised glance through the window, “if there isn’t that absent-minded schoolteacher coming through the yard! What can he want? Dear me, I do hope Teddy hasn’t been cutting capers in school again.”
For the teacher’s last call had been in October and had been occasioned by the fact that the irrepressible Teddy would persist in going to school with his pockets filled with live crickets and in driving them harnessed to strings up and down the aisle when the teacher’s back was turned. All mild methods of punishment having failed, the teacher had called to talk it over with Mrs. Grant, with the happy result that Teddy’s behaviour had improved—in the matter of crickets at least.
But it was about time for another outbreak. Teddy had been unnaturally good for too long a time. Poor Mrs. Grant feared that it was the calm before a storm, and it was with nervous haste that she went to the door and greeted the young teacher.
He was a slight, pale, boyish-looking fellow, with an abstracted, musing look in his large dark eyes. Mrs. Grant noticed with amusement that he wore a white straw hat in spite of the season. His eyes were directed to her face with his usual unseeing gaze.
“Just as though he was looking through me at something a thousand miles away,” said Mrs. Grant afterwards. “I believe he was, too. His body was right there on the step before me, but where his soul was is more than you or I or anybody can tell.”
“Good morning,” he said absently. “I have just called on my way to school with a message from Miss Millar. She wants you all to come up and have Christmas dinner with her tomorrow.”
“For the land’s sake!” said Mrs. Grant blankly. “I don’t understand.” To herself she thought, “I wish I dared take him and shake him to find if he’s walking in his sleep or not.”
A Vintage Christmas Page 7