The Big Book of Christmas

by Anton Chekhov

  … With a soft, fierce rush of feeling not her own, it seemed to her that her point of perception was somehow drawn inward, as if she no longer saw from the old places, as if something in her that was not used to looking, looked. In the seat where her will had been was no will. But somewhere in there, beyond all conflict, she felt herself to be. Beyond a thousand mists, volitions, little seekings for comfort, rebellions at toil, the cryings of personality for its physical own, she stood at last, herself within herself. And that which, through the slow process of her life and of life and being immeasurably before her, had been seeking its expression, building up its own vehicle of incarnation, quite suddenly and simply flowered. It was as if the weight and the striving within her had been the pangs of some birth. She stood, as light of heart as a little child, filled with peace and tender exaltation.

  These filled her on the road which she took to meet him—and took alone, for she would have no one go with her. ("What's come over Mary?" they asked one another in the kitchen. "She acts like she was somebody else and herself too.") The night lay about her as any other winter night, white and black,—a clean white world on which men set a pattern of highway and shelter, a clean dark sky on which a story is written in stars; and between—no mystery, but only growth. Out toward the drawbridge the road was not well broken. She went, stumbling in the ruts and hardly conscious of them. And Mary thought—

  "Something in me is glad.

  "It's as if something in me knew how to be glad more than I ever knew how alone.

  "For I'm nothing but me, here in Old Trail Town, and yet it's as if Something had come, secret, on purpose to make me know why to be glad.

  "It's something in the world bigger than I know about.

  "It's in me, and I guess it was in folks before me, and it will be in folks always.

  "It isn't just for Ebenezer Rule and the City.

  "It's for everybody, here in Old Trail Town as much as anywhere.

  "It's for folks that's hungry for it, and it's for folks that ain't.

  "It's always been in the world and it always will be in the world, and some day we'll know what to do."

  But this was hardly in her feeling, or even in her thought; it lay within her thanksgiving that the child was coming; and he only a little way down there across the marsh.

  … It seemed quite credible and even fitting that the mighty, rushing, lighted Express, which seldom stopped at Old Trail Town, should that night come thundering across the marsh, and slow down at the drawbridge for her sake and the little boy's. Several coaches' length from where she stood she saw a lantern shine where they were lifting him down. She ran ankle deep through the thinly crusted snow.

  "That's it!" said the conductor. "All the way from Idaho!" and swung his lantern from the step. "Merry Christmas!" he called back.

  The little thing clasping Mary's hand suddenly leaped up and down beside her.

  "Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!" he shouted with all his might.

  Mary Chavah stood silent, and as the train drew away held out her hand, still in silence, for the boy to take.

  As the noise of the train lessened, he looked up.

  "Are you her?" he asked soberly.

  "Yes," she cried joyously, "I'm her!"

  Their way led east between high banks of snow. At the end of the road was the village, looking like something lying on the great white plate of the meadows and being offered to one who needed it. At the far end of the road which was Old Trail Road, hung the blue arc light of the Town Hall, center to the constellation of the home lights and the shop lights and the street lights. There, in her house, were her neighbours, gathered to do no violence to that Christmas paper of theirs, since there was to be no "present trading," no "money spending." Nevertheless, they had drawn together by common consent, and it was Christmas Eve. She knew it now: There is no arbitrary shutting out of that for which Christmas stands. As its spirit was in the village, so its spirit is in the world—denied indeed, put upon, crowned with mockery, dragged in the dirt, bearing alien burdens, but through it all immaculate, waiting for men to cross the threshold at which it never ceases to beckon to a common heritage: Home of the world, with a thousand towers shining with uncounted lights, lying very near—above the village, at the end of the Old Trail Road, upon the earth at the end of a yet unbeaten path—where men face the sovereign fact of humanhood.

  … But all this lay within Mary's dumb thanksgiving that the child was running at her side. And the vision that she saw streamed down from Capella, of the brightness of an hundred of our suns, the star that stood in the east above the village where she lived.

  Lanterns glowed through the roadside shrubbery, little kindly lights, like answers; and at a bend in the road voices burst about them, and Buff Miles and the children, Gussie and Bennet and Tab and Pep and little Emily, ran, singing, and closed about Mary and the child, and went on with them, slipping into the "church choir Christmas carols," and more, that Buff had been fain to teach them. The music filled the quiet night, rose, in the children's voices, like an invocation to all time.

  * * *

  "One for the way it all begun,

  Two for the way it all has run,

  What three'll be for I do forget,

  But what will be has not been yet.

  So holly and mistletoe,

  So holly and mistletoe,

  So holly and mistletoe

  Over and over and over, oh!"

  * * *

  Between songs the children whispered together for a minute.

  "What's the new little boy's name?" asked Tab.

  Nobody knew. That would be something to find out.

  "Well," Tab said, "to-morrow morning, right after breakfast, I'm going to bring Theophilus Thistledown down and lend him to him."

  "Ain't we going to bury Sandy Claus right after breakfast?" demanded Gussie.

  And all the children, even little Emily, answered:

  "No, let's not."

  They all went on together and entered Mary's gate. Those within,—hearing the singing, had opened the door, and they brought them through that deep arch of warmth and light. Afterward, no one could remember whether or not the greeting had been "Merry Christmas," but there could have been no mistaking what everybody meant.

  Chapter 14

  At his gate in the street wall lined with snow-bowed lilacs and mulberries, Ebenezer Rule waited in the dark for his two friends to come back. He had found Kate Kerr in his kitchen methodically making a jar of Christmas cookies. ("You've got to eat, if it is Christmas," she had defended herself in a whisper.) And to her stupefaction he had dispatched her to Mary Chavah's with her entire Christmas baking in a basket.

  "I don't believe they've got near enough for all the folks I see going," he explained it.

  While he went within doors he had left the hobbyhorse in the snow, close to the wall; and he came back there to wait. The street had emptied. By now every one had gone to Mary Chavah's. Once he caught the gleam of lanterns down the road and heard children's voices singing. For some time he heard the singing, and after it had stopped he fancied that he heard it. Startled, he looked up into the wide night lying serene above the town, and not yet become vexed by the town's shadows and interrupted by their lights. It was as if the singing came from up there. But the night kept its way of looking steadily beyond him.

  … It came to Ebenezer that the night had not always been so unconscious of his presence. The one long ago, for example, when he had slept beneath this wall and dreamed that he had a kingdom; those other nights, when he had wandered abroad with his star glass. Then the night used to be something else. It had seemed to meet him, to admit him. Now he knew, and for a long time had known, that when he was abroad in the night he was there, so to say, without its permission. As for men, he could not tell when relation with them had changed, when he had begun to think of them as among the externals; but he knew that now he ran along the surface of them and let them go. He never met th
em as Others, as belonging to countless equations of which he was one term, and they playing that wonderful, near rôle of Other. Thus he had got along, as if his own individuation were the only one that had ever occurred and as if all the mass of mankind—and the Night and the Day—were undifferentiated from some substance all inimical.

  Then this vast egoism had heard itself expressed in the mention of Bruce's baby—the third generation. But by the great sorcery wherewith Nature has protected herself, this mammoth sense of self, when it extends unto the next generations, becomes a keeper of the race. Ebenezer had been touched, relaxed, disintegrated. Here was an interest outside himself which was yet no external. Vast, level reaches lay about that fact, and all long unexplored. But these were peopled. He saw them peopled… .

  … As in the cheer and stir within the house where that night were gathered his townsfolk, his neighbours, his "hands." He had thought that their way of meeting him, if he chose to go among them, would matter nothing. Abruptly now he saw that it would matter more than he could bear. They were in there at Mary's, the rooms full of little families, getting along as best they could, taking pride in their children, looking ahead, looking ahead—and they would not know that he understood. He could not have defined offhand what it was that he understood. But it had, it seemed, something to do with Letty's account book and Bruce's baby… .

  Gradually he let himself face what it was that he was wanting to do. And when he faced that, he left the hobbyhorse where it was under the wall and went into the street.

  He took his place among the externals of the Winter night, himself unconscious of them. The night, with all its content, a thing of explicable fellowships, lay waiting patiently for those of its children who knew its face. In the dark and under the snow the very elements of earth and life were obscured, as in some clear wash correcting too strong values. He moved along the village, and now his dominant consciousness was the same consciousness in which that little village lived. But he knew it only as the impulse that urged him on toward Jenny's house. If he went to Jenny's, if he signified so that he wished not to be cut off from her and Bruce and the baby, if he asked Bruce to come back to the business, these meant a lifetime of modification to the boy's ideals for that business, and modification to the lives of the "hands" back there in Mary Chavah's house—and to something else… .

  "What else?" he asked himself.

  Mechanically he looked up and saw the heavens crowded with bright watchers. In that high field one star, brighter than the others, hung over the little town. He found himself trying to see the stars as they had looked to him years ago, when they and the night had seemed to mean something else… .

  "What else?" he asked himself.

  The time did not seem momentous. It was only very quiet. Nothing new was there, nothing different. It had always been so. The night lay in a sovereign consciousness of being more than just itself. "Do you think that you are all just you and nothing else?" it was seen to be compassionately asking.

  "What else?" Ebenezer asked himself.

  He did not face this yet. But in that hour which seemed pure essence, with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward Jenny's house.

  Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where, in the dark, the tree stood. He had wanted the door to be ajar "so the things I think about can go back and forth," he had explained.

  In the dining room she wrapped herself in the gray shawl and threw up the two windows. New air swept in, cleansing, replacing, prevailing. Her guests had left her early, as is the way in Old Trail Town. Then she had had her first moments with the child alone. He had done the things that she had not thought of his doing but had inevitably recognized: Had delayed his bed-going, had magnified and repeated the offices of his journey, had shown her the contents of his pockets, had repeatedly mentioned by their first names his playmates in Idaho and shown surprise when she asked him who they were. Mary stood now by the window conscious of a wonderful thing: That it seemed as if he had been there always.

  In the clean inrush of the air she was aware of a faint fragrance, coming to her once and again. She looked down at her garden, lying wrapped in white and veiled with black, like some secret being. Three elements were slowly fashioning it, while the fourth, a soft fire within her, answered them. The fragrance made it seem as if the turn of the year were very near, as if its prophecy, evident once in the October violets in her garden, were come again. But when she moved, she knew that the fragrance came from within the room, from Ellen Bourne's Christmas rose, blossoming on the table… . Above, her eye fell on the picture that Jenny had brought to her on that day when she had all but emptied the house, as if in readiness. Almost she understood now the passionate expectation in that face, not unlike the expectation of those who in her dream had kept saying "You."

  There was a movement in her garden and on the walk footsteps. The three men stepped into the rectangle of lamplight—Abel, Ames and Simeon, who had left the party a little before the others and, hurrying back with the gifts that they planned, had met Ebenezer at his gate, getting home from Jenny's house. In Abel's arms was something globed, like a little world; in Simeon's, the tall, gray-gowned Saint Nicholas taken from the Exchange window, the lettered sign absent, but the little flag still in his hand; and Ebenezer was carrying the hobbyhorse. If at him the other two had wondered somewhat, they had said nothing, in that fashion of treating the essential which is as peculiar to certain simple, robust souls as to other kinds of great souls.

  "Has the boy gone to bed?" Abel asked without preface.

  "Yes," Mary answered, "he has. I'm sorry."

  "Never mind," Simeon whispered, "you can give him these in the morning."

  Mary, her shawl half hiding her face, stooped to take what the three lifted.

  "They ain't presents, you know," Abel assured her positively. "They're just—well, just to let him know."

  Mary set the strange assortment on the floor of the dining room—the things that were to be nothing in themselves, only just "to let him know."

  "Thank you for him," she said gently. "And thank you for me," she added.

  Ebenezer fumbled for a moment at his beaver hat, and took it off. Then the other two did so to their firm-fixed caps. And with an impulse that came from no one could tell whom, the three spoke—the first time hesitatingly, the next time together and confidently.

  "Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas," they said.

  Mary Chavah lifted her hand.

  "Merry Christmas!" she cried.