Ho! Ho! Ho! Santa Claus' Reading List

by A. A. Milne

  “Oh, mercy, no, my dear!” drawled the woman. “I see hundreds.”

  “Two girls I know of have recently come to Chicago looking for positions with moving picture concerns,” explained Nan, earnestly. “They are country girls, and their folks want them to come home.”

  “Runaways?”

  “Yes, ma’am. They have run away and their folks are dreadfully worried.”

  “I assure you,” said the moving picture director, smiling, “they have not been engaged at my studio. New people must furnish references— especially if they chance to be under age. Two girls from the country, you say, my dear? How is it they have come to think they can act for the screen?” and she laughed lightly again.

  Nan, sipping her tea and becoming more used to her surroundings and more confidential, told her new acquaintance all about Sallie Morton and Celia Snubbins.

  “Dear, dear,” the woman observed at last. “How can girls be so foolish? And the city is no place for them, alone, under any circumstances. If they should come to me I will communicate with their parents. I believe I should know them, my dear— two girls together, and both from the country?”

  “Oh! if you only would help them,” cried Nan. “I am sure such a kind act would be repaid.”

  The woman laughed. “I see you have faith in all the old fashioned virtues,” she said. “Dear me, girl! I am glad I met you. Tell me how I may communicate with the parents of these missing girls?”

  Nan did this; but she appreciated deeply the fact that the actress refrained from asking her any personal questions. After what Linda Riggs had said at the jewelry counter, Nan shrank from telling her name or where she lived to anybody who had heard her enemy.

  She parted from the moving picture director with great friendliness, however. As the latter kissed Nan she slipped a tiny engraved card into the girl’s hand.

  “Some time, when you have nothing better to do, my dear, come to see me,” she said. It was not until Nan was by herself again that she learned from the card that she had been the guest of a very famous actress of the legitimate stage who had, as well, become notable as a maker of moving pictures.

  The girl’s heart was too sore at first, when she met her friends as agreed in an entirely different part of the great store, to say anything about her adventure. But that night, when she and Bess were alone, Nan showed her chum the famous actress’ card, and told her how the moving picture director was likewise on the lookout for the two runaway girls.

  “Splendid!” cried Bess. “Keep on and we’ll have half the people in Chicago watching out for Sallie and Celia. But Nan! You do have the most marvelous way of meeting the most interesting people. Think of it! Knowing that very famous actress. How did you do it, Nan?”

  “Oh! something happened that caused us to speak,” Nan said lightly. But she winced at the thought of the unhappy nature of that incident. She was glad that Bess Harley was too sleepy to probe any deeper into the matter.

  How They Looked On The Screen

  Nan did not forget Inez, the flower-girl, nor the fact that the runaways— Sallie Morton and Celia Snubbins— might still be traced through Mother Beasley’s cheap lodging house.

  Both Walter and Grace Mason had been interested, as well as amused, in the chum’s account of their first adventure in Chicago. The brother and sister who lived so far away from the squalor of Mother Beasley’s and who knew nothing of the toil and shifts of the flower-seller’s existence, were deeply moved by the recital of what Nan and Bess had observed.

  “That poor little thing!” Grace said. “On the street in all weathers to sell posies— and for a drunken woman. Isn’t it awful? Something should be done about it. I’ll tell father.”

  “And he’d report the case to the Society,” said her brother, promptly. “Father believes all charity should be done through organizations. ‘Organized effort’ is his hobby,” added Walter, ruefully. “He says I lack proper appreciation of its value.”

  “But if he told the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children about Inez, they would take her and put her in some institution,” objected Nan.

  “And put a uniform on her like a prisoner,” cried Bess. “And make her obey rules like— like us boarding school girls. Oh, dear!”

  The others laughed at that.

  “Oh, you girls!” said Walter. “To hear you talk, one would think you were hounded like slaves at Lakeview Hall. You should have such a strict teacher as my tutor, for instance. He’s the fellow for driving one. He says he’ll have me ready for college in two years; but if he does, I know I shall feel as stuffed as a Strasburg goose.”

  “This learning so much that one will be glad to forget when one grows up,” sighed Bess, “is an awful waste of time.”

  “Why, Bess!” cried Grace Mason, “don’t you ever expect to read or write or spell or cipher when you grow up?”

  “No more than I can help,” declared the reckless Elizabeth.

  “And yet you’ve always talked about our going to college together,” said Nan, laughing at her chum.

  “But college girls never have to use what they learn— except fudge-making and dancing, and— and— well, the things that aren’t supposed to be in the curriculum,” declared Bess.

  “Treason! treason!” said Nan. “How dare you, Elizabeth? Pray what do girls go through college for?”

  “To fit themselves for the marriage state,” declared Bess. “My mother went to college and she says that every girl in her graduating class was married inside of five years— even the homely ones. You see, the homely ones make such perfectly splendid professors’ wives. There’s even a chance for Procrastination Boggs, you see.”

  “You ridiculous girl!” Nan said. “Come on! Who’s going down town with me? I can find my way around now, for I have studied a map of Chicago and I can go by the most direct route to Mother Beasley’s.”

  “And find that cunning little Inez, too?” asked Grace.

  “Yes. If I want to. But to-day I want to go to see if Sallie and Celia went back to Mrs. Beasley’s. I heard from Sallie’s mother by this morning’s post, and the poor woman is dreadfully worked up about the runaways. Mrs. Morton had a bad dream about Sallie, and the poor woman believes in dreams.”

  “She does!” exclaimed Grace. “I suppose she looks at a dream book every morning to see what each dream means. How funny!”

  “Goodness!” cried Bess. “Come to think of it, I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamed that I saw myself in the looking-glass and my reflection stepped right out and began to talk to me. We sat down and talked. It was so funny— just as though I were twins.”

  “What an imagination!” exclaimed Walter. “You don’t lack anything in that particular, for sure.”

  “Well,” declared Bess, “I want to know what it means.”

  “I can make a pretty close guess,” said Nan, shrewdly.

  “‘Vell, vas ist?’ as our good Frau Deuseldorf says when she gets impatient with our slowness in acquiring her beloved German.”

  “It means,” declared Nan, “that a combination of French pancake with peach marmalade, on top of chicken salad and mayonnaise, is not conducive to dreamless slumber. If you dreamt you met yourself on Grand Avenue parading at the head of a procession of Elizabeth Harleys, after such a dinner as you ate last night, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Carping critic!” exclaimed Bess, pouting. “Do let me eat what I like while I’m here. When we get back to Lakeview Hall you know Mrs. Cupp will want to put us all on half rations to counteract our holiday eating. I heard her bemoaning the fact to Dr. Beulah that we would come back with our stomachs so full that we would be unable to study for a fortnight.”

  “My! she is a Tartar, isn’t she?” was Walter’s comment.

  “Oh, you don’t know what we girls have to go through with at the Hall— what trials and privations,” said his sister, feelingly.

  “I can see it’s making you thin, Sis,” scoffed the boy. “And how about all
those midnight suppers, and candy sprees, and the like?”

  “Mercy!” exclaimed Bess. “If it were not for those extras we should all starve to death. There! we’ve missed that jitney. We’ll have to wait for another.”

  The girls and their escort got safely to the shabby street in which Mother Beasley kept her eating and lodging house; but they obtained no new information regarding the runaway girls who had spent their first night in Chicago with the poor, but good-hearted widow.

  Nor did they find Inez in her accustomed haunts near the railroad station; and it was too late that day to hunt the little flower-seller’s lodging, for Inez lived in an entirely different part of the town.

  “Rather a fruitless chase,” Walter said, as they walked from the car on which they had returned. “What are you going to do about those runaway girls, now?”

  “I don’t know— oh! stop a moment!” Nan suddenly cried. “What’s that over there?”

  “A picture palace; goodness knows they’re common enough,” said Bess.

  “But see what the sign says. Look, girls! Look, Walter!” and Nan excitedly pointed out the sheet hung above the arched entrance of the playhouse. “’A Rural Beauty’!” she cried. “That’s the very picture those two girls took part in. It’s been released.”

  “We must see it,” Bess cried. “I’m just crazy to see how Sallie and Celia look on the screen.”

  “Why! you never saw them. Do you think they will be labeled?” scoffed Walter.

  “Oh, we saw a photograph of Sallie; and if Celia looks anything like Mr. Si Snubbins, we can’t mistake her,” laughed Bess. “Let’s run over and go in.”

  “No,” Grace objected. “Mother never lets us go to a picture show without asking her permission first.”

  “No? Not even when Walter is with you?” asked Bess.

  “No. She wishes to know just what kind of picture I am going to see. She belongs to a club that tries to make the picture-play people in this neighborhood show only nice films. She says they’re not all to be trusted to do so.”

  “I guess this ‘Rural Beauty’ is a good enough picture,” Nan said; “but of course we’ll ask your mother’s permission before we go in.”

  “There it is,” groaned Bess. “Got to ask permission to breathe, I expect, pretty soon.”

  But she was glad, afterward, that they did ask Mrs. Mason. That careful lady telephoned the committee of her club having the censorship of picture plays in charge, and obtained its report upon “A Rural Beauty.” Then she sent Walter to the playhouse to buy a block of seats for that evening, and over the telephone a dozen other boys and girls— friends of Grace and Walter— were invited to join the party.

  They had a fine time, although the chums from Tillbury had not an opportunity of meeting all of the invited guests before the show.

  “But they are all going home with us for supper— just like a grown-up theatre party,” confided Grace to Nan and Bess.

  “Pearl Graves telephoned that she would be a little late and would have to bring her cousin with her. Mother told her to come along, cousin and all, of course.”

  Nan and Bess, with a couple of friends of the Masons’ whom they had already met, sat in the front row of the block of seats reserved for the party, and did not see the others when they entered the darkened house.

  Several short reels were run off before the first scene of “A Rural Beauty” was shown. It was a very amusing picture, being full of country types and characters, with a sweet little love story that pleased the girls, and some quite adventurous happenings that made a hit with Walter, as he admitted.

  Sallie Morton and Celia Snubbins were in the picture and the chums easily picked the runaways out on the screen. Sallie was a pretty girl, despite the fault her father had pointed out— that she was long-limbed. Nan and Bess knew Celia Snubbins because she did look like her father.

  The two girls had been used in the comedy scene of “A Rural Beauty” as contrasts to the leading lady in the play, who was made up most strikingly as the beautiful milkmaid who captured the honest young farmer in the end.

  There was a buzz of excitement among the Masons and those of their friends who had heard about the runaways over the appearance of Sallie and Celia when they came on the screen. As the party reached the lobby after the end of the last reel, Walter expressed his opinion emphatically regarding the runaway girls.

  “I declare! I think those two girls awfully foolish to run away from home if they couldn’t do anything more in a picture than they did in that one.”

  Nan was about to make some rejoinder, for Walter was walking beside her, when somebody said, back of them:

  “Why, you must know those girls ahead. They go to Lakeview Hall with Gracie Mason.”

  “Goodness! they are not staying with Grace and Walter, are they?” demanded a shrill and well remembered voice. “Why, I saw Nan Sherwood in trouble in one of the big stores the other day, for taking something from one of the counters.”

  Nan turned, horrified. The speaker was Linda Riggs.

  Nan On The Heights

  Mrs. Mason had not chaperoned the party of girls and boys to the motion picture show; but Miss Hagford, the English governess, was with them. Including the young hosts and Nan and Bess, there was almost a score in the party, and they made quite a bustling crowd in the lobby as they came out, adjusting their outer garments against the night air.

  Walter and Nan were in the lead and when Linda Riggs’ venomous tongue spat out the unkind words last repeated, few of the party heard her. Pearl Graves, her cousin, was beside the purse-proud girl who had been Nan’s bitter enemy since the day they had first met. Pearl was a different kind of girl entirely from Linda; in fact, she did not know her cousin very well, for Linda did not reside in Chicago. At her cousin’s harsh exclamation Pearl cried:

  “Hush, Linda! how can you say such things? That can not possibly be true.”

  “’Tis, too! And Nan won’t dare deny it,” whispered Linda. “She knows what her father is, too! Mr. and Mrs. Mason can’t have heard about Nan’s father being in trouble for taking a man’s watch and money in a sleeping car. Oh! I know all about it.”

  Walter Mason’s ears were sharp enough; but Linda spoke so hurriedly, and the boy was so amazed, that the cruel girl got thus far in her wicked speech before he turned and vehemently stopped her.

  “What do you mean by telling such a story as that about Nan?” demanded the boy, hoarsely. “And about her father, too? You are just the meanest girl I ever saw, Linda Riggs, and I’m sorry you’re in this party. I wish you were a boy— I’d teach you one good lesson— I would!”

  They stood just at the entrance to the theatre, where the electric lights were brightest. A few flakes of snow were falling, like glistening particles of tinsel. There were not many patrons entering the moving picture house at this late hour, but the remainder of the Masons’ guests crowded forward to hear and see what was going on.

  Nan was white-faced, but dry-eyed. Walter stood partly in front of her as though he were physically defending her, and held one of her hands while his other hand was tightly clenched, and his face ablaze with indignation.

  “Oh, Nan! What is the matter?” cried Bess Harley, running to Nan’s side and taking her other hand.

  “What has happened?” asked Grace Mason. “What is it, Walter?”

  “My goodness!” broke in Bess, before there could be any other explanation. “Here’s that horrid Linda Riggs. What brought her here, I’d like to know?”

  “I’ve as much right here as you have, Harley,” cried Linda. “I don’t have to worm myself into society that is above me, as you and your precious friend do. My father is as rich as any girl’s father here, I’d have you know.”

  “Oh, hush, Linda!” murmured Pearl Graves, very much ashamed of her cousin.

  “Walter! Grace! What does this mean?” demanded the governess, hurrying forward. “Don’t make a scene here, I beg. Have no quarreling.”

  But Walter w
as too greatly enraged to be easily amenable to the mild lady’s advice.

  “What do you think of this, Miss Hagford?” he cried excitedly. “Nan Sherwood has been at our house since the first day she and Bess arrived in Chicago; yet Linda Riggs says she saw Nan taking something in a store here.”

  “Hush, Walter, hush!” begged Miss Hagford. “People will hear you.”

  “Well, people heard her!” declared the angry youth.

  “We know Linda Riggs for what she is,” Bess put in. “But these other boys and girls don’t. Grace will tell you that Linda is the very meanest girl at Lakeview Hall.”

  “Oh! I couldn’t say that, Bess,” gasped timid Grace. “She is my guest for the evening!”

  “Well, I’ll say it for you,” burst out her brother. “Somebody should tell the truth about her.”

  “So they should,” chimed in Bess. “She’s a mean, spiteful thing!”

  “Stop! stop, all of you!” commanded the governess, sternly. “Why, this is disgraceful.”

  “I guess it is— I guess it is,” said Linda, bitterly. “But this is the sort of treatment I might expect from anybody so much under the influence of Sherwood and Harley, as Grace and Walter are. I tell you I saw Nan Sherwood being held by a detective in Wilson-Meadows store, because they said she had taken some jewelry from the counter. And she cannot deny it!”

  She said this with such positiveness, and was so much in earnest, that most of her hearers could not fail to be impressed. They stared at white-faced Nan to see if she had not something to say in her own defense. It seemed preposterous for Linda to repeat her charge so emphatically without some foundation for it.

  “It isn’t so!” cried Bess, first to gain her breath. “You know, Grace, Nan hasn’t been shopping unless you and I were both with her. That’s made up out of whole cloth!”

  “You were not with her that day, Miss Smartie,” cried the revengeful Linda. “And you see— she doesn’t deny it.”