Ho! Ho! Ho! Santa Claus' Reading List

by A. A. Milne

  "What's the picture?" Mary asked.

  "I don't know who it represents," said Jenny, "but it's nice."

  When Jenny had gone, Mary Chavah stood in the snow shaking the rug she had left outside, and looking at the clean, white town.

  "It looks like it was waiting for something," she thought.

  A door opened and shut. A child shouted. In the north east a shining body had come sparkling above the trees—Capella of the brightness of one hundred of our suns, being born into the twilight like a little star… .

  Mary closed the parlour windows and stood for a moment immersed in the quiet and emptiness of the clean rooms.

  "This looks like it was waiting for something, too," she thought. "But it ought to know it won't get it," she added whimsically.

  Then she went back to the warm room and saw the letter on the shelf. She meant to go in a moment to the stable to make it safe there for the night; so, with the gray shawl still binding her head and falling to her feet, she sat by the stove and read the letter.

  Chapter 5

  "… because she wasn't sick but two days and we never thought of her dying till she was dead. Otherwise we'd have telegraphed. She was buried yesterday, right here, and we'll get some kind of stone. You say how you think it'd ought to be marked. That's about all there is to tell except about Yes. He's six years old now and Aunt Mary this ain't a place for him. He's a nice little fellow and I hate for him to get rough and he will if he stays here. I'll do the best I can and earn money to help keep him but I want he should come and live with you… ."

  "I won't have him!" said Mary Chavah, aloud.

  "… he could come alone with a tag all right and I could send his things by freight. He ain't got much. You couldn't help but like him and I hate for him to get rough. Please answer and oblige your loving Nephew,

  "John Blood."

  Mary kept reading the letter and staring out into the snow. Her sister Lily's boy—they wanted to send him to her. Lily's boy and Adam Blood's—the man whose son she had thought would be her son. It was twenty years ago that he had been coming to the house—this same house—and she had thought that he was coming to see her, had never thought of Lily at all till Lily had told her of her own betrothal to him. It hurt yet. It had hurt freshly when he had died, seven years ago. Now Lily was dead, and Adam's eldest son, John, wanted to send this little brother to her, to have.

  "I won't take him," she said a great many times, and kept reading the letter and staring out into the snow.

  For Lily she had no tears—she seldom had tears at all. But after a little while she was conscious of a weight through her and in her, aching in her throat, her breast, her body. She rose and went near to the warmth of the fire, then to the freedom of the window against which the snow lay piled, then she sat down in the place where she worked, beside her patterns. The gray shawl still bound her head, and it was still in her mind that she must go to the barn and lock it. But she did not go—she sat in the darkening room with all her past crowding it… .

  … That first day with Adam at the Blood's picnic, given at his home-coming. They had met with all that perilous, ready-made intimacy which a school friendship of years before had allowed. As she had walked beside him she had known well what he was going to mean to her. She remembered the moment when he had contrived to ask her to wait until the others went, so that he might walk home with her. And when they had reached home, there on the porch—where she had just shaken the rugs in the snow—Lily had been sitting, a stool—one of the stools now at length banished to the shed—holding the hurt ankle that had kept her from the picnic. Adam had stayed an hour, and they had sat beside Lily. He had come again and again, and they had always sat beside Lily. Mary remembered that those were the days when she was happy in things—in the house and the look of the rooms and of the little garden from the porch, and of the old red-cushioned rocking-chairs on the tiny "stoop." She had loved her clothes and her little routines, and all these things had seemed desirable and ultimate because they two were sharing them. Then one day Mary had joined Lily and Adam there on the porch, and Lily had been looking up with new eyes, and Mary had searched her face, and then Adam's face; and they had all seemed in a sudden nakedness; and Mary had known that a great place was closed against her.

  Since then house and porch and garden and routines had become like those of other places. She had always been shut outside something, and always she had borne burdens. The death of her parents, gadflys of need, worst of all a curious feeling that the place closed against her was somehow herself—that, so to say, she and herself had never once met. She used to say that to herself sometimes, "There's two of me, and we don't meet—we don't meet."

  "And now he wants me to take her boy and Adam's," she kept saying; "I'll never do such a thing—never."

  She thought that the news of Lily's death was what gave her the strange, bodily hurt that had seized her—the news that what she was used to was gone; that she had no sister; that the days of their being together and all the tasks of their upbringing were finished. Then she thought that the remembering of those days of her happiness and her pain, and the ache of what might have been and of what never was, had come to torture her again. But the feeling was rather the weight of some imminent thing, the ravage of something that grew with what it fed on, the grasp upon her of something that would not let her go… .

  She had never seen them after their marriage, and so she had never seen either of the children. Lily had once sent her a picture of John, but she had never sent one of this other little boy. Mary tried to recall what they had ever said of him. She could not even remember his baptismal name, but she knew that they had called him "Yes" because it was the first word he had learned to say, and because he had said it to everything. "The baby can say 'Yes,'" Lily had written once; "I guess it's all he'll ever be able to say. He says it all day long. He won't try to say anything else." And once later: "We've taken to calling the baby 'Yes,' and now he calls himself that. 'Yes wants it,' he says, and 'Take Yes,' and 'Yes is going off now.' His father likes it. He says yes is everything and no is nothing. I don't think that means much, but we call him that for fun… ." But Mary could not remember what the child's real name was. What difference did it make? As if she could have a child meddling round the house while she was sewing. But of course this was not the real reason. The real reason was that she could not bring up a child—did she not know that?

  "… He's six years old now and Aunt Mary this ain't a place for him. He's a nice little fellow and I hate for him to get rough and he will if he stays here… ."

  She tried to think who else could take him. They had no one. Adam, she knew, had no one. Some of the neighbours there by the ranch … it was absurd to send him that long journey … so she went through it all, denying with all the old denials. And all the while the weight in her body grew and filled her, and she was strangely conscious of her breath.

  "What ails me?" she said aloud, and got up to kindle a light. She was amazed to see that it was seven o'clock, and long past her supper hour. As she took from the clock shelf the key to the barn, some one rapped at the back door and came through the cold kitchen with friendly familiarity. It was Jenny, a shawl over her head, her face glowing with the cold, and in her mittened hands a flat parcel.

  "My hand's most froze," Jenny admitted. "I didn't want to roll this thing, so I carried it flat out, and it blew consider'ble. It's the picture."

  "Get yourself warm," Mary bade her. "I'll undo it. Who is it of?" she added, as the papers came away.

  "That's what I don't know," said Jenny, "but I've always liked it around. I thought maybe you'd know."

  It was a picture which, in those days, had not before come to Old Trail Town. The figure was that of a youth, done by a master of the times—the head and shoulders of a youth who seemed to be looking passionately at something outside the picture.

  "There it is, anyhow," Jenny added. "If you like it enough to hang it up, hang it up. It's a Christ
mas present!" Jenny laughed elfishly.

  Mary Chavah held the picture out before her.

  "I do," she said; "I could take a real fancy to it. I'll have it up on the wall. Much obliged, I'm sure. Set down a minute."

  But Jenny could not do this, and Mary, the key to the barn still in her hands, followed her out. They went through the cold kitchen where the refrigerator and the ironing board and the clothes bars and all the familiar things stood in the dark. To Mary these were sunk in a great obscurity and insignificance, and even Jenny being there was unimportant beside the thing that her letter had brought to think about. They stepped out into the clear, glittering night, with its clean, white world, and its clean, dark sky on which some story was written in stars. Capella was shining almost overhead—and another star was hanging bright in the east, as if the east were always a dawning place for some new star.

  "Mary!" said Jenny, there in the dark.

  "Yes," Mary answered.

  "You know I said I just couldn't bear not to have any Christmas—this Christmas?"

  "Yes," Mary said.

  "Did you know why?"

  "I thought because it's your and Bruce's first—"

  "No," Jenny said, "that isn't all why. It's something else."

  She slipped her arm within Mary's and stood silent. And, Mary still not understanding,—

  "It's somebody else," Jenny said faintly.

  Mary stirred, turned to her in the dimness.

  "Why, Jenny!" she said.

  "Soon," said Jenny.

  The two women stood for a moment, Jenny saying a little, Mary quiet.

  "It'll be late in December," Jenny finished. "That seems so wonderful to me—so wonderful. Late in December, like—"

  The cold came pricking about them, and Jenny moved to go. Mary, the shawled figure on the upper step, looked down on the shawled figure below her, and abruptly spoke.

  "It's funny," Mary said, "that you should tell me that—now. I haven't told you what's in my letter."

  "What was?" asked Jenny.

  Mary told her. "They want I should have the little boy," she ended it.

  "Oh… ." Jenny said. "Mary! How wonderful for you! Why, it's almost next as wonderful as mine!"

  Mary hesitated for a breath. But she was profoundly stirred by what Jenny had told her—the first time, so far as she could recall, that news like this had ever come to her directly, as a secret and a marvel. News of the village births usually came in gossip, in commiseration, in suspicion. Falling as did this confidence in a time when she was re-living her old hope, when Adam's boy stood outside her threshold, the moment quite suddenly put on its real significance.

  "We can plan together," Jenny was saying. "Ain't it wonderful?"

  "Ain't it?" Mary said then, simply, and kissed Jenny, when Jenny came and kissed her. Then Jenny went away.

  Mary went on to the barn, and opened the door, and listened. She had brought no lantern, but the soft stillness within needed no vigilance. The hay smell from the loft and the mangers, the even breath of the cows, the quiet safety of the place, met her. She was wondering at herself, but she was struggling not at all. It was as if concerning the little boy, something had decided for her, in a soft, fierce rush of feeling not her own. She had committed herself to Jenny almost without will. But Mary felt no exultation, and the weight within her did not lift.

  "I really couldn't do anything else but take him, I s'pose," she thought. "I wonder what'll come on me next?"

  All the while, she was conscious of the raw smell of the clover in the hay of the mangers, as if something of Summer were there in the cold.

  Chapter 6

  Mary Chavah sent her letter of blunt directions concerning her sister's headstone and the few belongings which her sister had wished her to have. The last lines of the letter were about the boy.

  "Send the little one along. I am not the one, but I don't know what else to tell you to do with him. Let me know when to expect him, and put his name in with his things—I can't remember his right name."

  When the answer came from John Blood, a fortnight later, it said that a young fellow of those parts was starting back home shortly to spend Christmas, and would take charge of the child as far as the City, and there put him on his train for Old Trail Town. She would be notified just what day to expect him, and John knew how glad his mother would have been and his father too, and he was her grateful Nephew. P. S. He would send some money every month "toward him."

  The night after she received this letter, Mary lay long awake, facing what it was going to mean to have him there: to have a child there.

  She recalled what she had heard other women say about it,—stray utterances, made with the burdened look that hid a secret complacency, a kind of pleased freemasonry in a universal lot.

  "The children bring so much sand into the house. You'd think it was horses."

  "… the center table looks loaded and ready to start half the time … but I can't help it, with the children's books and truck."

  "… never would have another house built without a coat closet. The children's cloaks and caps and rubbers litter up everything."

  "… every one of their knees out, and their underclothes outgrown, and their waists soiled, the whole time. And I do try so hard… ."

  Now with all these bewilderments she was to have to do. She wondered if she would know how to dress him. Once she had watched Mis' Winslow dress a child, and she remembered what unexpected places Mis' Winslow had buttoned—buttonholes that went up and down in the skirt bands, and so on. Armholes might be too small and garters too tight, and how was one ever to know? If it were a little girl now … but a little boy… . What would she talk to him about while they ate together?

  She lay in the dark and planned—with no pleasure, but merely because she always planned everything, her dress, her baking, what she would say to this one and that. She would put up a stove in the back parlour, and give him the room "off." She was glad that the parlour was empty and clean—"no knick-knacks for a boy to knock around," she found herself thinking. And a child would like the bedroom wallpaper, with the owl border. When Summer came he could have the room over the dining room, with the kitchen roof sloping away from it where he could dry his hazelnuts—she had thought of the pasture hazelnuts, first thing. There were a good many things a boy would like about the place: the bird house where the martins always built, the hens, the big hollow tree, the pasture ant hill… . She would have to find out the things he liked to eat. She would have to help him with his lessons—she could do that for only a little while, until he would be too old to need her. Then maybe there would come the time when he would ask her things that she would not know… .

  She fell asleep wondering how he would look. Already, not from any impatience to have this done, but because that was the way in which she worked, she had his room in order; and her picture of his father was by the mirror, the young face of his father. Something faded had been written below the picture, and this she had painstakingly rubbed away before she set the picture in its place. Next day, while she was working on Mis' Jane Moran's bead basque that was to be cut over and turned, she laid it aside and cut out a jacket pattern, and a plaited waist pattern—just to see if she could. These she rolled up impatiently and stuffed away in her pattern bookcase.

  "I knew how to do them all the while, and I never knew I knew," she thought with annoyed surprise. "I s'pose I'll waste a lot of time pottering over him."

  It was so that she spent the weeks until the letter came telling her what day the child would start. On the afternoon of the day the letter came, she went down town to the Amos Ames Emporium to buy a washbasin and pitcher for the room she meant the little boy to have. She stood looking at a basin with a row of brown dogs around the rim, when over her shoulder Mis' Abby Winslow spoke.

  "You ain't buying a Christmas present for anybody, are you?" she asked warningly.

  Mary started guiltily and denied it.

  "Well, what in time do y
ou want with dogs on the basin?" Mis' Winslow demanded.

  Almost against her own wish, Mary told her. Mis' Winslow was one of those whose faces are invariable forerunners of the sort of thing they are going to say. With eyebrows, eyes, forehead, head, and voice she took the news.

  "He is! Forever and ever more. When's he going to get here?"

  "Week after next," Mary said listlessly. "It's an awful responsibility, ain't it—taking a child so?"

  Mis' Winslow's face abruptly rejected its own anxious lines and let the eyes speak for it.

  "I always think children is like air," she said; "you never realize how hard they're pressing down on you—but you do know you can't live without them."

  Mary looked at her, her own face not lighting.

  "I'd rather go along like I am," she said; "I'm used to myself the way I am."

  "Mary Chavah!" said Mis' Winslow, sharply, "a vegetable sprouts. Can't you? Is these stocking caps made so's they won't ravel?" she inquired capably of Abel Ames. "These are real good value, Mary," she added kindly. "Better su'prise the little thing with one of these. A red one."

  Mary counted over her money, and bought the red stocking cap and the basin with the puppies. Then she went into the street. The sense of oppression, of striving, that had seldom left her since that night in the stable, made the day a thing to be borne, to be breasted. The air was thick with snow, and in the whiteness the dreary familiarity of the drug store, the meat market, the post office, the Simeon Buck Dry Goods Exchange, smote her with a passion to escape from them all, to breed new familiars, to get free of the thing that she had said she would do.