The Second Christmas Megapack

by Robert Reginald

  Three wall telephones were changed to table phones on Mrs. Budlong’s account, and Mrs. Talbot had hers put by the bed. She used to take naps while Mrs. Budlong talked and she trained herself to murmur, “Yes, dear,” at intervals in her sleep.

  By means like this Mrs. Budlong kept Carthage more or less under her thumb. Carthage squirmed but it could not crawl out from under.

  This is the story of how the thumb was removed for good and all. It was Mrs. Budlong herself that removed it. Carthage could never have pried it up.

  And strange to say the thumb came off because it grew popular.

  Hitherto Mrs. Budlong had never been truly popular. People were merely afraid of her. She was a whipper-in, a social bush-beater, driving the populace from cover like partridges. She would not let the town rest. The merchants alone admired her, for she was the cause of much buying of new shoes, new hats, new clothes, fine groceries, olives, Malaga grapes, salted almonds, raisins, English walnuts and other things that one eats only at parties. She was the first woman in Carthage that ever gave a luncheon and called it breakfast, as years before she had been the first hostess to give a dinner at any time except in the middle of the day. Also, she was the first person there to say, “Come to me” when she meant “Come to our house.” It had a Scriptural sound and was thought shocking until Carthage grew used to it.

  It was due to her that several elderly men were forced into their first evening dress. They had thought to escape through life without that ordeal. Old Clute would have preferred to be fitted for a pine box, and would have felt about as comfortable in it. He tried to compromise with the tailor on a garment that could serve as a Prince Albert by day and a “swaller tail” by night, but Mr. Kweskin could not manage it even though his Christian name was Moses.

  So Mr. Clute blamed Mrs. Budlong for yet another expense. Husbands all over town were blaming Mrs. Budlong for running their families into fool extravagances. Mothers were blaming her for dragging them round by the nose and leaving them no rest. But everybody in town resentfully obeyed Mrs. Budlong, though Mrs. Roscoe Detwiller wanted to organize a HomeKeepers Union, and strike. For the women never dared trust themselves about the house in a wrapper, since Mrs. Budlong might happen in as like as not—rather liker than not.

  And then, just as the town was fermenting for revolt, Mrs. Budlong came into a lot of money.

  IV. ONLY A MILLIONAIRE

  That is, Mr. Budlong came into a lot of money. Which meant that Mr. Budlong would be permitted to take care of it while his wife got rid of it. One of those relatives, very common in fiction, and not altogether unknown in real life, finally let go of her money at the behest of her impatient undertaker. The Budlongs had the pleasure of seeing the glorious news of their good fortune in big headlines in the Carthage papers.

  It was the only display Mr. Budlong ever received in that paper without paying for it—excepting the time when he ran for Mayor on the opposition ticket and was referred to in letters an inch high as “Candidate Nipped-in-the-Budlong.”

  But now the cornucopia of plenty had burst wide open on the front porch. It seemed as if they would have to wade through gold dollars to get to their front gate—when the money was collected. When the money was collected.

  And now it was Mrs. Budlong’s telephone that rang and rang. It was she that was called up and called up. It was she that sagged along the wall and shifted from foot to foot, from elbow to elbow and ear to ear.

  After living in Carthage all her life she was suddenly, as it were, welcomed to the city as a distinguished visiting stranger. And now she had no need to invite people to return their calls. They came spontaneously. Sometimes there were a dozen calling at once. It was a reception every day. There were overflow meetings in the room which Mrs. Budlong called Mr. Budlong’s “den.” This was the place where she kept the furniture that she didn’t dare keep in the parlor.

  People who had never come to see her in spite of her prehensile telephone, dropped in to pay up some musty old call that had lain unreturned for years. People who had always come formally, even funereally, rushed in as informally and with as devouring an enthusiasm as old chums. People who used to run in informally now drove up in vehicles from MacMulkin’s livery stable; or if they came in their own turn-outs they had the tops washed and the harness polished, and the gardener and furnaceman who drove, had his hat brushed, was not allowed to smoke, and was urged to sit up straight and for heaven’s sake to keep his foot off the dashboard.

  People who had been in the habit of devoting a day or two to cleaning up a year’s social debts and went up and down the streets dropping doleful calls like wreaths on headstones, walked in unannounced of mornings. It was now Mrs. Budlong that had to keep dressed up all day. Everybody accepted the inevitable invitations to have a cup of tea, till the cook struck. Cook said she had conthracted to cuke for a small family, not to run a continurous bairbecue. Besides she had to answer the doorbell so much she couldn’t get her hands into the dough, before they were out again. And dinner was never ready. The amount of tea consumed and bakery cake and the butter, began to alarm Mrs. Budlong. And Carthage people were so nervous at taking tea with a millionairess that they kept dropping cups or setting saucers down too hard.

  Mrs. Budlong had never a moment the whole day long to leave the house, and she suddenly found herself without a call returned. She had so many invitations to dinners and luncheons, that her life became a hop, skip and jump.

  During the first ecstasy of the good news, Mrs. Budlong had raved over the places she was going to travel—Paris (now pronounced Paree), London, Vienna, St. Marks, the Lion of Lucerne—she talked like a handbook of Cook’s Tours. To successive callers she told the story over and over till the rhapsody finally palled on her own tongue. She began to hate Paree, London, Vienna, St. Marks, and to loathe the Lion of Lucerne. All she wanted to do was to get out of town to some quiet retreat. Carthage was no longer quiet. It simmered to the boiling-over point.

  Once it had been Mrs. Budlong’s pride to be the social leader of Carthage. Now that her husband was worth (or to be worth) a hundred thousand dollars Carthage seemed a very petty parish to be the social leader of. She began to read New York society notes with expectancy, as one cons the Baedeker of a town one is approaching.

  She lay awake nights wondering what she should wear at Mrs. Stuyvesant Square’s next party and at Mrs. Astor House’s sociable. She fretted the choice whether she should take a letter from her church to St. Bartholomew’s or to Grace or St. John’s the Divine’s. And all the while she was pouring tea for the wives of harness makers and druggists, dentists and grocers.

  The more reason for not appearing before them in the same clothes incessantly. But with a dinner or a reception or a tea or a ball every night, her two dressy-up dresses became so familiar that at one party when she was coming downstairs from laying off her cloak people spoke to her dress before they could see her face. And she could hardly afford to get new clothes, for after all she had not come into the money. She had just come at it, or toward it; or as her husband began to say, tip against it.

  Mr. Budlong was kept on such tenterhooks by lawyers and papers to sign, titles to clear, executors and executrices to consult, and waivers, deeds, indentures and things that he had no time for his regular business.

  As there is housemaid’s knee, and painter’s colic, so there is millionaire’s melancholia. And the Budlongs were enduring the illness without entertaining the microbe.

  It is almost as much trouble to inherit money nowadays as to earn it in the first place. Mr. Budlong was confronted with such a list of post-mortem debts that must be postpaid for his deceased Aunt Ida that he almost begrudged her her bit of very real estate in Woodlawn. And the Budlongs began to think that tombstones were in bad form if ostentatious. Heirs have notoriously simple tastes in monuments.

  They had always accounted Aunt Ida a hard-fisted miser before, but now she began to look like a slippery-palmed spendthrift. They began almost to
suspect the probity of the poor old maid. Worse yet, they feared that a later will might turn up bequeathing all her money to some abominable charity or other. She had been addicted to occasional subscriptions during her lifetime.

  The Budlongs themselves were beginning, even at this distance from their money-to-be, to suffer its infection, its inevitable reaction on the character. Those who live beyond their means joyously when their means are small, become small themselves, when their means get beyond living beyond. The Budlongs began to figure percentages on sums left in the bank or put out on mortgages. They began to think money; and money is money, large or small. Mrs. Budlong began to feel that she had been unjust to Aunt Ida. What she had called miserliness was really prudence and thrift and other pleasant-sounding virtues. What she had called liberality was wanton waste.

  Finally her social debts reached such a mass that she decided to give a large dinner to wipe off a great number at once. But now when she calculated that the olives, the turkey, the Malaga grapes, the English walnuts, the salted almonds and a man from the hotel to wait on table, would total up twenty-five dollars or so, she found herself figuring how much twenty-five dollars would amount to in twenty-five years at compound interest.

  She grew frantic to be quit of Carthage—to rub it off her visiting list. Unconsciously her motto became Cato’s ruthless, Carthago delenda est.

  But she could neither delete Carthage from her map, nor free her feet from its dust. Her husband’s business required him yet awhile. Even to close it up took time. And he would not, and could not, borrow money on Aunt Ida’s estate till he was sure that it was his.

  But all the while the festival reveled on. People in Carthage to whom New York was an inaccessible Carcassone, were now planning to visit Mrs. Budlong there at the palatial home she had described. Some of them frankly told her they were coming to see her. Wealth took on a new discomfort.

  Sally Swezey afflicted the telephone with gossip: “As Mrs. Talbot was saying only yes’day, my dear, so many folks have threatened to visit you in your home on Fifth Avenue that you’ll have to hang hammocks in your front yard.”

  And now they had spoiled even her future for her. What pride could she take in having a gorgeous home on Fifth Avenue with all these Carthage people rocking on the front porch. Probably some warm evening when Mrs. Hotel Vanderbilt was driving by in her new barouche, it would be just like Roscoe Detwiller to turn in at the gate, flounce down on the top step and sit there with his vest unbuttoned, and his seersucker coat under his arm, while he mopped the inside of his hat with his handkerchief.

  But that was the discomfort of the morrow. Today had its own spawn. One morning she was called to the telephone by the merciless Sallie Swezey with a new infliction. There was something almost ghoulish in Mrs. Swezey’s cackling glee as she sang out across the wire:

  “We’re all so glad, my dear, that the next meeting of the Progressive Euchre is to be at your house.”

  Mrs. Budlong’s chin dropped. She had quite forgotten this. Sallie chortled on:

  “And say, do you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Everybody says you’re going to give solid gold prizes and that even your booby prize will be handsomer than the first prize was at Mrs. Detwiller’s.”

  “Ha, ha!” laughed Mrs. Budlong in a tone that sounded just like the spelling.

  Mrs. Budlong’s wealth seemed to be accepted as a sort of municipal legacy. All Carthage assumed to own it in community, and to enjoy it with her. Her walls rang with the hilarity of her neighbors. But her laughter took on more and more the sound of icicles snapping from the eaves of a shed.

  She became the logical candidate for all the chief offices in clubs and societies and circles. She suddenly found herself seven or eight presidents and at least eleven chairwomen. The richest woman in town heretofore was Mrs. Foster Herpers, wife of the pole and shaft manufacturer. He owned about half of the real estate in town, but his wife had to distill expenses out of him in pennies. With a profound sigh of relief she resigned all her honors in Mrs. Budlong’s favor.

  Being president chiefly meant lending one’s house for meetings as well as one’s china and tea and sandwiches, and being five dollars ahead of anybody else in every subscription. Mrs. Budlong was panic-stricken with her own success, for there is nothing harder to handle than a dam-break of prosperity.

  Worse yet, Mr. Budlong was ceasing to be the meek thing of yore. Every day was the first of the month with him.

  It was well on in November when he flung himself into a Morris chair one evening and groaned aloud:

  “I don’t believe Aunt Ida ever left any money. If she did I don’t believe we’ll ever get any of it. And if we do, I know we’ll not have a sniff at it before January. One of the lawyers has been called abroad on another case. We’ve got to stay in Carthage, at least over Christmas.”

  “Christmas!” The word crackled and sputtered in Mrs. Budlong’s brain like a fuse in the dark. The past month had been so packed with other excitements that she had forgotten the very word. Now it blew up and came down as if one of her own unstable Christmas trees had toppled over on her with all its ropes of tinsel, its lambent tapers, and its eggshell splendors.

  V. THE BITER BIT

  First, Mrs. Budlong felt amazement that she could have so ignored the very focus of her former ambition. Then she felt shame at her unpreparedness. She caught the evening paper out of her husband’s lap to find the date. November ninth and not a Christmas thing begun. Yet a few days and the news-stands would have apprised her that Christmas was coming, for by the middle of November all the magazines put on their holly and their chromos of the three Magi and their Santa Clauses, as women put on summer straw hats at Easter.

  Mrs. Budlong’s hands sought and wrung each other as if in mutual reproach. They had been pouring tea and passing wafers when they should have been Dorcassing at their Christmas tasks. It had been left for her husband of all people to warn her that her own special Bacchanal was imminent.

  If he had been a day later, the neighbors would have anticipated him as well as the magazines. The Christmas idea seemed to strike the whole town at once. Mrs. Budlong became the victim of her own classic device of pretending to let slip a secret. The townswomen shamelessly turned her own formula against her.

  Mrs. Detwiller met her at church and said:

  “Yesterday morning at eleven I had the most curious presentiment, my dear. I remember the hour so exactly because I’ve been making it a rule to begin work on your Christmas present every morning at— Oh, but I didn’t inTend to let you know. No, dearie, I won’t tell you what it is. But I can’t help believing it’s Just what you’ll need in New York.”

  Myra Eppley, with whom Mrs. Budlong had never exchanged Christmas presents, at all, but with whom an intimacy had sprung up since Mrs. Budlong came into the reputation of her money—Myra Eppley had the effrontery to call up on the telephone and say:

  “Would you mind telling me, my dear, the shade of wall paper you’re going to have in your New York parlor, because I’m making you the daintiest little—well, no matter, but will you tell me?”

  Poor Mrs. Budlong almost swooned from the telephone. She did not know what the color of her wall paper would be in New York. She did not know that she would ever have wall paper in New York. She only knew that Myra Eppley, too, was calling her “my dear.” Myra Eppley also was going to give her a Christmas present. And would have to be given one.

  Mrs. Budlong had received fair warning, but she felt about as grateful as a wayfarer feels to the rattlesnake that whizzes “Make r-r-r-ready for the corrroner-r-r.”

  Next, young Mrs. Chur (Editha Cinnamon as was, for she had finally landed Mr. Chur in spite of the accident—or because of it) called up to say:

  “Oh, my dear, my husband wants to know what brand of cigars your husband smokes; and would you tell me, dearie—it’s rather personal, but—what size bath-slippers you wear?”

  When Sally Swezey came to the
Progressive Euchre skirmish at Mrs. Budlong’s she noted with joy that her hint had borne fruit. The prizes were indeed of solid gold. Mr. Budlong did not learn it till the first of the following month when the bill came in from Jim Henderson’s jewelry store.

  As if she had not done enough in forcing solid gold prizes on Mr. Budlong, Sally had to say:

  “I’m just dying to see your back parlor, my dear, this next Christmas afternoon. It has always been a sight for sore eyes; but this Christmas it will be a perfect wonder, for I do declare everybody in town is going to send you something nice.”

  This conviction was already chilling Mrs. Budlong’s marrow. Of old she would have rejoiced at the golden triumph, but now she could only realize that if everybody in Carthage sent her something nice, it was because everybody in Carthage expected something nicer. And her Christmas crops were hopelessly backward. At a time when she should be half done, she could not even begin. She had not tatted or smeared or hammered a thing.

  VI. DESPAIR AND AN IDEA

  Days and days went by in a stupor of dull hopelessness. Thanksgiving came and the Budlong turkey might as well have been a crow. In desperation she decided to make a tentative exploration of the shops now burgeoning with Christmas splendor; every window a spasm of gewgaws. Since she had no time to make, she must buy.

  The length of her list sent her to the cheaper counters, but she was not permitted to browse among them. At Strouther and Streckfuss’s, Mr. Strouther came up and said with reeking unctuousness:

  “Vat is Mees Bootlonk doink down here amonkst all this tresh? Come see our importet novelties.”

  And he led her to a region where the minimum price was MBBA-BDJA, which meant that it cost 12.25 and could be safely marked down to 23.75.

  She eluded him and got back to the twenty-five-cent realm only to be apprehended by Mr. Streckfuss, who beamed:

  “Ah, nothink is here for a lady like you are. Only fine kvality suits such a taste you got.”