by A. A. Milne
"If we've got the things made," she said, "can't we give 'em? If it's to children?"
"I think if we're going to omit, we'd ought to omit," Mis Bates held her own; "it can't matter to you, Ellen, with no children, so … " She caught herself sharply up. Ellen's little boy had died a Christmas or two ago.
"No," Ellen said, "I ain't any children, of course. But—"
"Well, I think," said Mis' Jane Moran, "that we've hit on the only way we could have hit on to chirk each other up over a hard time."
"And get off delicate ourselves same time," said Buff Miles. From the first Buff had been advocating what he called "an open Christmas," and there were those near him at the meeting to whom he had confided some plan about "church choir Christmas carol serenades," which he was loath to see set at naught.
Not much afterward Simeon Buck put the motion:—
"Mis' Chairman," he said, "I move you—and all of us—that the Old Trail Town meeting do and hereby does declare itself in favour of striking Christmas celebrations from its calendar this year. And that we circulate a petition through the town to this effect, headed by our names. And that we all own up that it's for the simple and regretful reason that not a mother's son of us can afford to buy Christmas presents this year, and what's the use of scratching to keep up appearances?"
For a breath Abel Ames hesitated; then he spoke voluntarily for the first time that evening.
"Mr. President, I second the hull of that," said he, slowly, and without looking at anybody; and then sighed his vast, triple sigh.
There was apparently nobody to vote against the motion. Mis' Winslow did not vote at all. Ellen Bourne said "No," but she said it so faintly that nobody heard save those nearest her, and they felt a bit embarrassed for her because she had spoken alone, and they tried to cover up the minute.
"Carried," said the Chair, and slipped out in the kitchen to put on the coffee.
At the meeting there was almost nobody who, in the course of the evening, did not make or reply to some form of observation on one theme. It was:—
"Well, I wish Mary Chavah'd been to the meeting. She'd have enjoyed herself."
Or, "Well, won't Mary Chavah be glad of this plan they've got? She's wanted it a good while."
Or, "We all seem to have come to Mary Chavah's way of thinking, don't we? You know, she ain't kept any Christmas for years."
Unless it was Abel Ames. He, in fact, made or replied to almost no observations that evening. He drank his coffee without cream, sugar, or spoon,—they are always overlooking somebody's essentials in this way, and such is Old Trail Town's shy courtesy that the omission is never mentioned or repaired by the victim,—and sighed his triple sigh at intervals, and went home.
"Hetty," he said to his wife, who had not gone to the meeting, "they put it through. We won't have no Christmas creditors this year. We don't have to furnish charged Christmas presents for nobody."
She looked up from the towel she was featherstitching—she was a little woman who carried her head back and had large eyes and the long, curved lashes of a child.
"I s'pose you're real relieved, ain't you, Abel?" she answered.
"My, yes," said Abel, without expression. "My, yes."
They all took the news home in different wise.
"Matthew," said Ellen Bourne, "the town meeting voted not to have any Christmas this year. That is, to ask the folks not to have any—'count of expense."
"Sensible move," said Matthew, sharpening his ax by the kitchen stove.
"It'll be a relief for most folks not to have the muss and the clutter," said Ellen's mother.
"Hey, king and country!" said Ellen's old father, whittling a stick, "I ain't done no more'n look on at a Christmas for ten years and more—with no children around so."
"I know," said Ellen Bourne, "I know… ."
The announcement was greeted by Mortimer Bates with a slap of the knee.
"Good-by, folderol!" he said. "We need a sane Christmas in the world a good sight more'n we need a sane Fourth, most places. Good work."
But Bennet and Gussie Bates burst into wails.
"Hush!" said Mis' Bates, peremptorily. "You ain't the only ones, remember. It's no Christmas for nobody!"
"I thought the rest of 'em would have one an' we could go over to theirs… ." sobbed Gussie.
"I'd rather p'etend it's Christmas in other houses even if we ain't it!" mourned Bennet.
"Be my little man and woman," admonished Mis' Mortimer Bates.
At the Morans, little Emily Moran made an unexpected deduction:—
"I won't stay in bed all day Christmas!" she gave out.
"Stay in bed!" echoed Mis' Moran. "Why on this earth should you stay in bed?"
"Well, if we get up, then it's Christmas and you can't stop it!" little Emily triumphed.
When they told Pep, the minister's son, after a long preparation by story and other gradual approach, and a Socratic questioning cleverly winning damning admissions from Pep, he looked up in his father's face thoughtfully:—
"If they ain't no Christ's birthday this year, is it a lie that Christ was born?" he demanded.
And secretly the children took counsel with one another: Would Buff Miles, the church choir tenor, take them out after dark on Christmas Eve, to sing church choir serenades at folks' gates, or would he not? And when they thought that he might not, because this would be considered Christmas celebration and would only make the absence of present-giving the more conspicuous, as in the case of the Sunday schools themselves, they faced still another theological quandary: For if it was true that Christ was born, then Christmas was his birthday; and if Christmas was his birthday, wasn't it wicked not to pay any attention?
Alone of them all, little Tab Winslow rejoiced. His brothers and sisters made the time tearful with questionings as to the effect on Santa Claus, and how would they get word to him, and would it be Christmas in the City, and why couldn't they move there, and other matters denoting the reversal of this their earth. But Tab slipped out the kitchen door, to the corner of the barn, where the great turkey gobbler who had been named held his empire trustingly.
"Oh, Theophilus Thistledown," said Tab to him, "you're the only one in this town that's goin' to have a Christmas. You ain't got to be et."
Chapter 4
The placard was tacked to the Old Trail Town post-office wall, between a summons to join the Army and the Navy of the United States, and the reward offered for an escaped convict—all three manifestoes registering something of the stage of society's development.
* * *
NOTICE
Owing to the local business depression and to the current private decisions to get up very few home Christmas celebrations this year, and also to the vote of the various lodges, churches, Sunday schools, etc., etc., etc., to forego the usual Christmas tree observances, the merchants of this town have one and all united with most of the folks to petition the rest to omit all Christmas presents, believing that the Christmas spirit will be kept up best by all agreeing to act alike. All that's willing may announce it by signing below and notifying others.
The Committee.
* * *
There were only three hundred folk living in Old Trail Town. Already two thirds of their signatures were scrawled on the sheets of foolscap tacked beneath the notice.
On the day after her return home, Jenny Wing stood and stared at the notice. Her mother had written to her of the town's talk, but the placard made it seem worse.
"I'll go in on the way home and see what Mary says," she thought, and asked for the letter that lay in Mary Chavah's box, next her own. They gave her the letter without question. All Old Trail Town asks for its neighbour's mail and reads its neighbour's postmarks and gets to know the different Writings and to inquire after them, like persons. ("He ain't got so much of a curl to his M to-day," one will say of a superscription. "Better write right back and chirk 'im up." Or, "Here's Her that don't seal her letters good. Tell her about that, why don't you?
" Or, "This Writing's a stranger to me. I'll just wait a minute to see if birth or death gets out of the envelope.")
As she closed Mary's gate and hurried up the walk, in a keen wind flowing with little pricking flakes, Jenny was startled to see both parlour windows open. The white muslin curtains were blowing idly as if June were in the air. Turning as a matter of course to the path that led to the kitchen, she was hailed by Mary, who came out the front door with a rug in her hands.
"Step right in this way," said Mary; "this door's unfastened."
"Forevermore!" Jenny said, "Mary Chavah! What you got your house all open for? You ain't moving?"
A gust of wind took Mary's answer. She tossed the rug across the icy railing of the porch and beckoned Jenny into the house, and into the parlour. And when she had greeted Jenny after the months of her absence:—
"See," Mary said exultantly, "don't it look grand and empty? Look at it first, and then come on in and I'll tell you about it."
The white-papered walls of the two rooms were bare of pictures; the floor had been sparingly laid with rugs. The walnut sofa and chairs, the table for the lamp, and the long shelves of her grandfather's books—these were all that the room held. A white arch divided the two chambers, like a benign brow whose face had long been dimmed away. It was all exquisitely clean and icy cold. A little snow drifted in through the muslin curtains. The breath of the two women showed.
"What on earth you done that for?" Jenny demanded.
Mary Chavah stood in the empty archway, the satisfaction on her face not veiling its pure austerity. She was not much past thirty-three, but she looked older, for she was gaunt. Her flesh had lost its firmness, her dressmaking had stooped her, her strong frame moved as if it habitually shouldered its way. In her broad forehead and deep eyes and somewhat in her silent mouth, you read the woman—the rest of her was obscured in her gentle reticence. She had a gray shawl, blue-bordered, folded tightly about her head and pinned under her chin, and it wrapped her to her feet.
"I feel like a thing in a new shell," she said. "Come on in where it's warm."
Instead of moving her dining-room table to her kitchen, as most of Old Trail Town did in Winter, Mary had moved her cooking stove into the dining room, had improvised a calico-curtained cupboard for the utensils, and there she lived and sewed. The windows were bare.
"I'll let the parlour have curtains if it wants to," she had said, "but in the room I live in I want every strip of the sun I can get."
There were no plants, though every house in Old Trail Town had a window of green, and slips without number were offered… .
"… You can have flowers all you want," she said once; "I like 'em too well to box 'em up in the house."
And there were no books.
"I don't read," she admitted; "I ain't ever read a book in my life but "Pilgrim's Progress" and the first four chapters of "Ben Hur." What's the use of pretending, when books is such a nuisance to dust? Grandfather's books in the parlour—oh, they ain't books. They're furniture."
But she had a little bookcase whose shelves were filled with her patterns—in her dressmaking she never used a fashion plate.
"I like to make 'em up and cut 'em out," she sometimes told her friends. "I don't care nothing whatever about the dresses when they get done—more fool the women for ornamenting themselves up like lamp shades, I always think. But I just do love to fuss with the paper and make it do like I say. Land, I've got my cupboard full of more patterns than I'd ever get orders for if I lived to be born again."
She sat down before the cooking stove and drew off her woolen mittens. She folded a hand on her cheek, forcing the cheek out of drawing by her hand's pressure. There was always about her gestures a curious nakedness—indeed, about her face and hands. They were naïve, perfectly likely to reveal themselves in their current awkwardness and ugliness of momentary expression which, by its very frankness, made a new law as it broke an old one.
"Don't you tell folks I've been house cleaning," she warned Jenny. "The town would think I was crazy, with the thermometer acting up zero so. Anyway, I ain't been house cleaning. I just simply got so sick to death of all the truck piled up in this house that I had to get away from it. And this morning it looked so clean and white and smooth outdoors that I felt so cluttered up I couldn't sew. I begun on this room—and then I kept on with the parlour. I've took out the lambrequins and 'leven pictures and the what-not and four moth-catching rugs and four sofa pillows, and I've packed the whole lot of 'em into the attic. I've done the same to my bedroom. I've emptied my house out of all the stuff the folks' and the folks' folks and their folks—clear back to Grandmother Hackett had in here—I mean the truck part. Not the good. And I guess now I've got some room to live in."
Jenny looked at her admiringly, and asked: "How did you ever do it? I can't bear to throw things away. I can't bear to move things from where they've been."
"I didn't use to want to," said Mary, "but lately—I do. The Winter's so clean, you kind of have to, to keep up. What's the news?"
"Here's a letter," Jenny said, and handed it. "I didn't look to see who it's from. I guess it's a strange Writing, anyway."
Mary glanced indifferently at it. "It's from Lily's boy, out West," she said, and laid the letter on the shelf. "I meant, what's the news about you?"
Jenny's eyes widened swiftly. "News about me?" she said. "Who said there was any news about me?"
"Nobody," Mary said evenly; "but you've been gone most a year, ain't you?"
"Oh," Jenny said, "yes… ."
For really, when Old Trail Town stopped to think of it, Jenny Wing was Mrs. Bruce Rule, and had been so for a year. But no one thought of calling her that. It always takes Old Trail Town several years to adopt its marriages. They would graduate first to "Jenny Wing that was," and then to "Jenny Wing What's-name," and then to "Mis' Rule that was Jenny Wing… ."
"… You tell me some news," Jenny added. "Mother don't ever write much but the necessaries."
"That's all there's been," Mary Chavah told her; "we ain't had no luxuries for news in forever."
"But there's that notice in the post office," cried Jenny. "I come home to spend Christmas, and there's that notice in the post office. Mother wrote nobody was going to do anything for Christmas, but she never wrote me that. I've brought home some little things I made——"
"Oh—Christmas!" Mary said. "Yes, they all got together and concluded best not have any. You know, since the failure—"
Mary hesitated—Ebenezer Rule was Bruce Rule's uncle.
"I know," said Jenny, "it's Uncle Ebenezer. I don't know how I'm going to tell Bruce when he comes. To think it's in our family, the reason they can't have any Christmas… ."
"Nonsense," said Mary, briskly; "no Christmas presents is real sensible, my way of thinking. It's been 'leven years since I've given a Christmas present to anybody. The first Christmas after mother died, I couldn't—I just couldn't. That kind of got me out of the idea, and then I see all the nonsense of it."
"The nonsense?" Jenny repeated.
"If you don't like folks, you don't want to give nothing to them or take nothing from them. And if you do like 'em you don't want to have to wait to Christmas to give 'em things. Ain't that so?" Mary Chavah put it.
"No," said Jenny; "it ain't. Not a bit so." And when Mary laughed, questioned her, pressed her, "It seems perfectly awful to me not to have a Christmas," Jenny could say only, "I feel like the Winter didn't have no backbone to it."
"It's a dead time, Winter," Mary assented. "What's the use of tricking it up with gewgaws and pretending it's a live time? Besides, if you ain't got the money, you ain't got the money. And nobody has, this year. Unless they go ahead and buy things anyway, like the City."
Jenny shook her head. "I got seven Christmas-present relatives and ten Christmas-present friends, and I've only spent Two Dollars and Eighty cents on 'em all," she said, "for material. But I've made little things for every one of 'em. It don't seem as if that much had ough
t to hurt any one."
Jenny looked past her out the window, somewhere beyond the snow.
"They's something else," she added, "it ain't all present giving… ."
"Nonsense," said Mary Chavah, "take the present trading away from Christmas and see how long it'd last. I was in the City once for Christmas. I'll never forget it—never. I never see folks work like the folks worked there. The streets was Bedlam. The stores was worse. 'What'll I get him?… ' 'I've just got to get something for her… .' 'It don't seem as if this is nice enough after what she give me last year… .' I can hear 'em yet. They spent money wicked. And I said to myself that I was glad from my head to my feet that I was done with Christmas. And I been preaching it ever since. And I'm pleased this town has had to come to it."
"It ain't the way I feel," said Jenny. She got up and wandered to the window and hardly heard while Mary went on with more of the sort. "It seems kind of like going back on the ways things are," Jenny said, as she turned. Then, as she made ready to go, she broke off and smote her hands together.
"Oh," she said, "it don't seem as if I could bear it not to have Christmas—not this year."
"You mean your and Bruce's first Christmas," said Mary. "Mark my words, he'll be glad to be rid of the fuss. Men always are. Come on out the front door if you're going," said Mary. "You might as well use it when it's open."
As Jenny passed the open parlour door, she looked in again at the bare room.
"Don't you like pictures?" she asked abruptly.
"I like 'em when I like 'em," Mary answered. "I didn't like them I had up here—I had a shot stag and a fruit piece and an eagle with a child in its claws. I've loathed 'em for years, but I ain't ever had the heart to throw 'em out till now. They're over behind the coal bin."
Jenny thought. "They's a picture over to mother's," she said, "that she ain't put up because she ain't had the money to frame it. I guess I'll bring it over after supper and see if you don't want it up here—frame or no frame." She looked at Mary and laughed. "If I bring it to you to-night," she said, "it ain't a Christmas present—legal. But if I want to call it a Christmas present inside me, the town can't help that."
