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CHRISTMAS

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

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[Illustration: "MARY FILLED HER ARMS WITH HAY AND TURNED TO THE
MANGER"]

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CHRISTMAS

A STORY

BY
ZONA GALE
AUTHOR OF "THE LOVES OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE"
"FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
LEON V. SOLON

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1912
All rights reserved

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COPYRIGHT, 1912,
BY THE McCLURE PUBLICATIONS, INCORPORATED.

COPYRIGHT, 1912,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1912.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

"Mary filled her arms with hay, and turned to the
manger" Frontispiece

FACING
PAGE

"He stood looking at it from part way across the road" 76

"Across the still fields came flashing the point of
flame" 110

"The children began to sing, 'Go bury Saint Nicklis'" 150

"Their way led east between high banks of snow" 200

"The three men stepped into the lamplight" 240

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CHRISTMAS

I

It was in October that Mary Chavah burned over the grass of her lawn,
and the flame ran free across the place where in Spring her wild flower
bed was made. Two weeks later she had there a great patch of purple
violets. And all Old Trail Town, which takes account of its neighbours'
flowers, of the migratory birds, of eclipses, and the like, came to see
the wonder.

"Mary Chavah!" said most of the village, "you're the luckiest woman
alive. If a miracle was bound to happen, it'd get itself happened to
you."

"I don't believe in miracles, though," Mary wrote to Jenny Wing. "These
come just natural--only we don't know how."

"That _is_ miracles," Jenny wrote back. "They do come natural--we don't
know how."

"At this rate," said Ellen Bourne, one of Mary's neighbours, "you'll be
having roses bloom in your yard about Christmas time. For a Christmas
present."

"I don't believe in Christmas," Mary said. "I thought you knew that. But
I'll take the roses, though, if they come in the Winter," she added,
with her queer flash of smile.

When it was dusk, or early in the morning, Mary Chavah, with her long
shawl over her head, stooped beside the violets and loosened the earth
about them with her whole hand, and as if she reverenced violets more
than finger tips. And she thought:--

"Ain't it just as if Spring was right over back of the air all the
time--and it could come if we knew how to call it? But we don't know."

But whatever she thought about it, Mary kept in her heart. For it was as
if not only Spring, but new life, or some other holy thing were nearer
than one thought and had spoken to her, there on the edge of Winter.

And Old Trail Town asked itself:--

"Ain't Mary Chavah the funniest? Look how nice she is about
everything--and yet you know she won't never keep Christmas at all. No,
sir. She ain't kept a single Christmas in years. I donno why...."

II

Moving about on his little lawn in the dark, Ebenezer Rule was aware of
two deeper shadows before him. They were between him and the leafless
lilacs and mulberries that lined the street wall. A moment before he had
been looking at that darkness and remembering how, once, as a little
boy, he had slept there under the wall and had dreamed that he had a
kingdom.

"Who is't?" he asked sharply.

"Hello, Ebenezer," said Simeon Buck, "it's only me and Abel. We're all."

Ebenezer Rule came toward them. It was so dark that they could barely
distinguish each other. Their voices had to do it all.

"What you doing out here?" one of the deeper shadows demanded.

"Oh, nothing," said Ebenezer, irritably, "not a thing."

He did not ask them to go in the house, and the three stood there
awkwardly, handling the time like a blunt instrument. Then Simeon Buck,
proprietor of the Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange, plunged
into what they had come to say.

"Ebenezer," he said, with those variations of intonation which mean an
effort to be delicate, "is--is there any likelihood that the factory
will open up this Fall?"

"No, there ain't," Ebenezer said, like something shutting.

"Nor--nor this Winter?" Simeon pursued.

"No, sir," said Ebenezer, like something opening again to shut with a
bang.

"Well, if you're sure--" said Simeon.

Ebenezer cut him short. "I'm dead sure," he said. "I've turned over my
orders to my brother's house in the City. He can handle 'em all and not
have to pay his men a cent more wages." And this was as if something had
been locked.

"Well," said Simeon, "then, Abel, I move we go ahead."

Abel Ames, proprietor of the Granger County Merchandise Emporium ("The
A. T. Stewart's of the Middle West," he advertised it), sighed
heavily--a vast, triple sigh, that seemed to sigh both in and out, as a
schoolboy whistles.

"Well," he said, "I hate to do it. But I'll be billblowed if I want to
think of paying for a third or so of this town's Christmas presents and
carrying 'em right through the Winter. I done that last year, and Fourth
of July I had all I could do to keep from wishing most of the crowd
Merry Christmas, 'count of their still owing me. I'm a merchant and a
citizen, but I ain't no patent adjustable Christmas tree."

"Me neither," Simeon said. "Last year it was _me_ give a silk cloak and
a Five Dollar umbrella and a fur bore and a bushel of knick-knicks to
the folks in this town. My name wa'n't on the cards, but it's me that's
paid for 'em--_up_ to now. I'm sick of it. The storekeepers of this town
may make a good thing out of Christmas, but they'd ought to get some of
the credit instead of giving it all, by Josh."

"What you going to do?" inquired Ebenezer, dryly.

"Well, of course last year was an exceptional year," said Abel,
"owing--"

He hesitated to say "owing to the failure of the Ebenezer Rule Factory
Company," and so stammered with the utmost delicacy, and skipped a
measure.

"And we thought," Simeon finished, "that if the factory wasn't going to
open up this Winter, we'd work things so's to have little or no
Christmas in town this year--being so much of the present giving falls
on us to carry on our books."

"It ain't only the factory wages, of course," Abel interposed, "it's the
folks's savings being et up in--"

"--the failure," he would have added, but skipped a mere beat instead.

"--and we want to try to give 'em a chance to pay us up for last
Christmas before they come on to themselves with another celebration,"
he added reasonably.

Ebenezer Rule laughed--a descending scale of laughter that seemed to
have no organs wherewith to function in the open, and so never got
beyond the gutturals.

"How you going to fix it?" he inquired again.

"Why," said Simeon, "everybody in town's talking that they ain't going
to give anybody anything for Christmas. Some means it and some don't.
Some'll do it and some'll back out. But the churches has decided to omit
Christmas exercises altogether this year. Some thought to have speaking
pieces, but everybody concluded if they had exercises without oranges
and candy the children'd go home disappointed, so they've left the whole
thing slide--"

"It don't seem just right for 'em not to celebrate the birth of our Lord
just because they can't afford the candy," Abel Ames observed mildly,
but Simeon hurried on:--

"--slide, and my idea and Abel's is to get the town meeting to vote a
petition to the same effect asking the town not to try to do anything
with their Christmas this year. We heard the factory wasn't going to
open, and we thought if we could tell 'em that for sure, it would settle
it--and save him and me and all the rest of 'em. Would--would you be
willing for us to tell the town meeting that? It's to-night--we're on
the way there."

"Sure," said Ebenezer Rule, "tell 'em. And you might point out to 'em,"
he added, with his spasm of gutturals, "that failures is often salutary
measures. Public benefactions. Fixes folks so's they can't spend their
money fool."

He walked with them across the lawn, going between them and guiding them
among the empty aster beds.

"They think I et up their savings in the failure," he went on, "when all
I done is to bring 'em face to face with the fact that for years they've
been overspending themselves. It takes Christmas to show that up. This
whole Christmas business is about wore out, anyhow. Ain't it?"

"That's what," Simeon said, "it's a spendin' sham, from edge to edge."

Abel Ames was silent. The three skirted the flower beds and came out on
the level sweep of turf before the house that was no house in the
darkness, save that they remembered how it looked: a square, smoked
thing, with a beard of dead creepers and white shades lidded over its
never-lighted windows--a fit home for this man least-liked of the three
hundred neighbours who made Old Trail Town. He touched the elbows of the
other two men as they walked in the dark, but he rarely touched any
human being. And now Abel Ames suddenly put his hand down on that of
Ebenezer, where it lay in the crook of Abel's elbow.

"What you got there?" he asked.

"Nothing much," Ebenezer answered, irritably again. "It's an old glass.
I was looking over some rubbish, and I found it--over back. It's a field
glass."

"What you got a field glass out in the dark for?" Abel demanded.

"I used to fool with it some when I was a little shaver," Ebenezer said.
He put the glass in Abel's hand. "On the sky," he added.

Abel lifted the glass and turned it on the heavens. There, above the
little side lawn, the firmament had unclothed itself of branches and lay
in a glorious nakedness to three horizons.

"Thunder," Abel said, "look at 'em look."

Sweeping the field with the lens, Abel spoke meanwhile.

"Seems as if I'd kind of miss all the fuss in the store around
Christmas," he said,--"the extra rush and the trimming up and all."

"Abel'll miss lavishin' his store with cut paper, I guess," said Simeon;
"he dotes on tassels."

"Last year," Abel went on, not lowering the glass, "I had a little kid
come in the store Christmas Eve, that I'd never see before. He ask' me
if he could get warm--and he set down on the edge of a chair by the
stove, and he took in everything in the place. I ask' him his name, and
he just smiled. I ask' him if he was glad it was Christmas, and he says,
Was I. I was goin' to give him some cough drops, but when I come back
from waiting on somebody he was gone. I never could find out who he was,
nor see anybody that saw him. I thought mebbe this Christmas he'd come
back. Lord, don't it look like a pasture of buttercups up there? Here,
Simeon."

Simeon, talking, took the glass and lifted it to the stars.

"Cut paper doin's is all very well," he said, "but the worst nightmare
of the year to the stores is Christmas. I always think it's come to be
'Peace on earth, good will to men and extravagance of women.' Quite a
nice little till of gold pieces up there in the sky, ain't there? I'd
kind o' like to stake a claim out up there--eh? Lay it out along about
around that bright one down there--by Josh," he broke off, "look at that
bright one."

Simeon kept looking through the glass, and he leaned a little forward to
try to see the better.

"What is it?" he repeated, "what's that one? It's the biggest star I
ever see--"

The other two looked where he was looking, low in the east. But they saw
nothing save boughs indeterminately moving and a spatter of sparkling
points not more bright than those of the upper field.

"You look," Simeon bade the vague presence that was his host; but
through the glass, Ebenezer still saw nothing that challenged his sight.

"I don't know the name of a star in the sky, except the dipper," he
grumbled, "but I don't see anything out of the ordinary, anyhow."

"It is," Simeon protested; "I tell you, it's the biggest star I ever
saw. It's blue and purple and green and yellow--"

Abel had the glass now, and he had looked hardly sooner than he had
recognized.

"Sure," he said, "I've got it. It _is_ blue and purple and green and
yellow, and it's as big as most stars put together. It twinkles--yes,
sir, and it swings...." he broke off, laughing at the mystification of
the others, and laughed so that he could not go on.

"Is it a comet, do you s'pose?" said Simeon.

"No," said Abel, "no. It's come to stay. It's our individual private
star. It's the arc light in front of the Town Hall you two are looking
at."

They moved to where Abel stood, and from there, up the rise of ground to
the east, they could see Simeon's star, shining softly and throwing
long rays, it seemed, almost to where they stood: the lamp that marked
the heart of the village.

"Shucks," said Simeon.

"Sold," said Ebenezer.

"Why, I don't know," said Abel, "I kind of like to see it through the
glass. It looks like it was a bigger light than we give it credit for."

"It's a big enough light," said Ebenezer, testily. It was his own plant
at the factory that made possible the town's three arc lights, and these
had been continued by him at the factory's closing.

"No use making fun of your friends' eyesight because you're all of
twenty minutes younger than them," Simeon grumbled. "Come on, Abel. It
must be gettin' round the clock."

Abel lingered.

"A man owns the hull thing with a glass o' this stamp," he said. "How
much does one like that cost?" he inquired.

"I'll sell you this one--" began Ebenezer; "wait a week or two and I may
sell you this one," he said. "I ain't really looked through it myself
yet."

Not much after this, the two went away and left Ebenezer in the dark
yard.

He stood in the middle of his little grass plot and looked through his
glass again. That night there was, so to say, nothing remote about the
sky, save its distance. It had none of the reticence of clouds. It made
you think of a bed of golden bells, each invisible stalk trying on its
own account to help forward some Spring. As he had said, he did not know
one star from another, nor a planet for a planet with a name. It had
been years since he had seen the heavens so near. He moved about,
looking, and passed the wall of leafless lilacs and mulberries. Stars
hung in his boughs like fruit for the plucking. They patterned patches
of sky. He looked away and back, and it was as if the stars repeated
themselves, like the chorus of everything.

"You beggars," Ebenezer said, "awful dressed up, ain't you? It must be
for something up there--it ain't for anything down here, let me tell
you."

He went up to his dark back door. From without there he could hear Kate
Kerr, his general servant, who had sufficient personality to compel the
term "housekeeper," setting sponge for bread, with a slapping, hollow
sound and a force that implied a frown for every down stroke of the iron
spoon. He knew how she would turn toward the door as he entered, with
her way of arching eyebrows, in the manner of one about to recite the
symptoms of a change for the worse--or at best to say "about the same"
to everything in the universe. And when Kate Kerr spoke, she always
whispered on the faintest provocation.

A sudden distaste for the entire inside of his house seized Ebenezer. He
turned and wandered back down the little dark yard, looking up at the
high field of the stars, with only his dim eyes.

"There must be quite a little to know about them," he thought, "if
anybody was enough interested."

Then he remembered Simeon and Abel, and laughed again in his way.

"I done the town a good turn for once, didn't I?" he thought; "I've
fixed folks so's they can't spend their money fool!"

Two steps from Ebenezer's front gate, Simeon and Abel overtook a woman.
She had a long shawl over her head, and she was humming some faint air
of her own making.

"Coming to the meeting, Mary?" Simeon asked as they passed her.

"No," said Mary Chavah, "I started for it. But it's such a nice night
I'm going to walk around."

"Things are going to go your way to that meeting, I guess," said Simeon;
"ain't you always found fault with Christmas?"

"They's a lot o' nonsense about it," Mary assented; "I don't ever bother
myself much with it. Why?"

"I donno but we'll all come round to your way of thinking to-night,"
said Simeon.

"For just this year!" Abel Ames called back, as they went on.

"You can't do much else, I guess," said Mary. "Everybody dips Christmas
up out of their pocketbooks, and if there ain't nothing there, they
can't dip."

The men laughed with her, and went on down the long street toward the
town. Mary followed slowly, under the yellowing elms that made great
golden shades for the dim post lamps. And high at the far end of the
street down which they went, hung the blue arc light before the Town
Hall, center to the constellation of the home lights and the shop lights
and the street lights, all near neighbours to the stream and sweep of
the stars hanging a little higher and shining as by one sun.

III

It was interesting to see how they took the proposal to drop that
Christmas from the calendar there in Old Trail Town. It was so eminently
a sensible thing to do, and they all knew it. Oh, every way they looked
at it, it was sensible, and they admitted it. Yet, besides Mary Chavah
and Ebenezer Rule, probably the only person in the town whose
satisfaction in the project could be counted on to be unfeigned was
little Tab Winslow. For Tab, as all the town knew, had a turkey brought
up by his own hand to be the Winslows' Christmas dinner, but such had
become Tab's intimacy with and fondness for the turkey that he was
prepared to forego his Christmas if only that dinner were foregone,
too.

"Theophilus Thistledown is such a human turkey," Tab had been heard
explaining patiently; "he knows me--and he knows his name. He don't
_expect_ us to eat him ... why, you _can't_ eat anything that knows its
name."

But every one else was just merely sensible. And they had been
discussing Christmas in this sensible strain at the town meeting that
night, before Simeon and Abel broached their plan for standardizing
their sensible leanings.

Somebody had said that Jenny Wing, and Bruce Rule, who was Ebenezer's
nephew, were expected home for Christmas, and had added that it "didn't
look as if there would be much of any Christmas down to the station to
meet them." On which Mis' Mortimer Bates had spoken out, philosophical
to the point of brutality. Mis' Bates was little and brown and quick,
and her clothes seemed always to curtain her off, so that her figure
was no part of her presence.

"I ain't going to do a thing for Christmas this year," she declared, as
nearly everybody in the village had intermittently declared, "not a
living, breathing thing. I can't, and folks might just as well know it,
flat foot. What's the use of buying tinsel and flim-flam when you're
eating milk gravy to save butter and using salt sacks for handkerchiefs?
I ain't educated up to see it."

Mis' Jane Moran, who had changed her chair three times to avoid a
draught, sat down carefully in her fourth chair, her face twitching a
little as if its muscles were connected with her joints.

"Christmas won't be no different from any other day to our house this
year," she said. "We'll get up and eat our three meals and sit down and
look at each other. We can't even spare a hen--she might lay if we
didn't eat her."

Mis' Abby Winslow, mother of seven under fifteen, looked up from her
rocking-chair--Mis' Winslow always sat limp in chairs as if they were
reaching out to rest her and, indeed, this occasional yielding to the
force of gravity was almost her only luxury.

"You ain't thinking of the children, Mis' Bates," she said, "nor you
either, Jane Moran, or you couldn't talk that way. We can't have no real
Christmas, of course. But I'd planned some little things made out of
what I had in the house: things that wouldn't be anything, and yet would
seem a little something."

Mis' Mortimer Bates swept round at her.

"Children," she said, "ought to be showed how to do without things.
Bennet and Gussie ain't expecting a sliver of nothing for Christmas--not
a sliver."

Mis' Winslow unexpectedly flared up.

"Whether it shows through on the outside or not," she said, "I'll bet
you they are."

"My three," Mis' Emerson Morse put in pacifically, "have been kept from
popping corn and cracking nuts all Fall so's they could do both
Christmas night, and it would seem like something that _was_ something."

"That ain't the idea," Mis' Bates insisted; "I want them learnt to do
without--" ("They'll learn that," Mis' Abby Winslow said; "they'll
learn....") "Happening as it does to most every one of us not to have no
Christmas, they won't be no distinctions drawn. None of the children can
brag--and children is limbs of Satan for bragging," she added. (She was
remembering a brief conversation overheard that day between Gussie and
Pep, the minister's son:--

"I've got a doll," said Gussie.

"I've got a dollar," said Pep.

"My mamma went to a tea party," said Gussie.

"My mamma give one," said Pep.

Gussie mustered her forces. "My papa goes to work every morning," she
topped it.

"My papa don't have to," said Pep, and closed the incident.)

"I can't help who's a limb of Satan," Mis' Winslow replied doggedly, "I
can't seem to sense Christmas time without Christmas."

"It won't _be_ Christmas time if you don't have any Christmas," Mis'
Bates persisted.

"Oh, yes it will," Mis' Winslow said. "Oh, yes, it will. You can't stop
that."

It was Mis' Bates, who, from the high-backed plush rocker, rapped with
the blue glass paperweight on the red glass lamp and, in the absence of
Mr. Bates, called the meeting to order. The Old Trail Town Society was
organized on a platform of "membership unlimited, dues nothing but
taking turns with the entertaining, officers to consist of: President,
the host of the evening (or wife, if any), and no minutes to bother
with." And it was to a meeting so disposed on the subject of Christmas
that Simeon Buck rose to present his argument.

"Mr. President," he addressed the chair.

"It's Madam President, you ninny geese," corrected Buff Miles, _sotto
voce_.

"It had ought to be Madam Chairman," objected Mis' Moran; "she ain't the
continuous president."

"Well, for the land sakes, call me Mis' Bates, formal, and go ahead,"
said the lady under discussion. "Only I bet you've forgot now what you
was going to say."

"Not much I did _not_," Simeon Buck continued composedly, and, ignoring
the interruptions, let his own vocative stand. Then he presented a
memorandum of a sum of money. It was not a large sum. But when he quoted
it, everybody looked at everybody else, stricken. For it was a sum large
enough to have required, in the earning, months of work on the part of
an appalling proportion of Old Trail Town.

"From the day after Thanksgiving to the night before Christmas last
year," said Simeon, "that is the amount that the three hundred
souls--no, I guess it must have been bodies--in our town spent in the
local stores. Now, bare living expenses aside,--which ain't very much
for us all, these days,--this amount may be assumed to have been spent
by the lot of us for Christmas. Of course there was those," continued
Mr. Buck, looking intelligently about him, "who bought most of their
Christmas stuff in the City. But these--these economic traitors only
make the point of what I say the more so. Without them, the town spent
this truly amazing sum in keeping the holidays. Now, I ask you, frank,
could the town afford that, or anything like that?"

Buff Miles spoke out of the extremity of his reflections.

"That's a funny crack," he said, "for a merchant to make. Why not leave
'em spend and leave 'em pay?"

"Oh, I'll leave 'em _pay_ all right," rejoined Simeon, significantly,
and stood silent and smiling until there were those in the room who
uncomfortably shifted.

Then he told them the word he bore from Ebenezer Rule that as they had
feared and half expected, the factory was not to open that Winter at
all. Hardly a family represented in the rooms was not also
representative of a factory employee, now idle these seven months, as
they were periodically idle at the times of "enforced" suspension of the
work.

"What I'm getting at is this," Simeon summed it up, "and Abel Ames,
here, backs me up--don't you, Abel?--that hadn't we all ought to come to
some joint conclusion about our Christmas this year, and roust the town
up to it, like a town, and not go it blind and either get in up to our
necks in debt, same as City folks, or else quit off Christmas,
individual, and mebbe hurt folks's feelings? Why not move intelligent,
like a town, and all agree out-and-out to leave Christmas go by this
year? And have it understood, thorough?"

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