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Title: Mary Christmas
Author: Mary Ellen Chase
Release Date: March 20, 2023 [eBook #70325]
Language: English
Produced by: Tim Lindell, Krista Zaleski and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY CHRISTMAS ***
MARY CHRISTMAS
[Illustration: BY HIS SIDE WALKED THE STRANGEST PERSON THE FOUR
WESCOTTS HAD EVER SEEN]
MARY CHRISTMAS
BY
MARY ELLEN CHASE
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1936
_Copyright, 1926_,
BY MARY ELLEN CHASE.
_All rights reserved_
Published April, 1926
Reprinted September, 1926
Reprinted January, 1927
Reprinted August, 1936
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS PUBLICATIONS
ARE PUBLISHED BY
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I CONCERNING A COLLAR AND TIE 3
II A BLUE GINGHAM AND AN ANCIENT LAND 19
III UNBURIED TREASURE 33
IV A WILD CRAB-APPLE TREE 44
V THE GARDEN OF EDEN 50
VI A GOOD SAINT AND A SILVER BOX 68
VII A PILLAR OF FIRE 80
VIII SHOWERS OF GOLD AND PEARLS 91
IX FOLKLORE AND POLITICS 103
X WAYSIDE SACRAMENTS 118
XI SHORT TWILIGHTS AND DRIFTING PETALS 126
XII MARY CHRISTMAS DAYS 138
MARY CHRISTMAS
_His candle shined upon my head, and ... by His light I
walked through darkness...._
_My root was spread out by the waters, and the dew lay all
night upon my branch._
THE BOOK OF JOB
I
CONCERNING A COLLAR AND TIE
Long years ago, in those speedless days of the late nineties when
children dropped homemade curtsies and said, “Yes, ma’am” and “No,
sir” quite as a matter of course, when they recited the sixty-three
books of the Bible, the kings of Israel, and the twelve disciples
according to St. Matthew without the least idea of achievement, when
baby specialists and motion pictures were almost unknown, and when
the efficacy of springtime asafœtida-bags and of sulphur and molasses
taken according to the magic rule of three was sponsored by the most
intelligent of parents--years ago, on a certain warm day very early in
the month of June, the four Wescott children, who were swinging on a
white gate beneath great elm trees, were startled by the most curious
and, for the duration of a long half-hour, quite inexplicable behavior
on the part of their father. At high noon, just as the church clock
was sending twelve mellow, wavering notes down through the sunlit air
to cling unseen to tree-tops or to hide in daisy fields--at high noon
he came up the street in full view of his neighbors, and halted with no
apparent embarrassment before his four awestruck children, _wearing
his collar and tie_!
* * * * *
Now, at the imminent risk of ruining the artistic value of this
story,--for we know only too well what it means to stop a truly
dramatic incident when it wants to go on,--we must, in all fairness
to the father of the four Wescotts, on the one hand, describe--since
we cannot explain--a certain distressingly peculiar habit of his, and
on the other, assure our readers that neither he nor his wife nor his
four children had ever because of it suffered the slightest lessening
of social standing in their community. For years, during the months
of May, June, July, August, and September, it had been Mr. Wescott’s
deplorable custom to traverse the distance between his law office over
the village grocery store and his home with his collar and tie in his
left hand. Otherwise his appearance was above reproach. His neat
gray suit was immaculately pressed and brushed, his neat straw hat
was placed at a most conservative angle, his neat black shoes shone
from his own early-morning labor, the gold-headed cane which he always
carried bespoke the gentleman that he was. But--_his collar and tie
hung from his left hand_.
No one felt entirely sure as to the date and origin of this custom.
Mrs. Wescott, who, it will be readily granted, should have known more
about those matters than anyone else, was not secure in her mind
concerning them. It is true that once, in the strictest confidence, she
disclosed to Mary, the eldest of the four Wescotts, her belief that the
habit had originated in those over-heated and perilous days when Father
Wescott had been doing his best to save the country in general and the
State of Maine in particular from the election of President Cleveland.
She furthermore advanced the opinion--which, as Mary grew older, she
was inclined to share--that the continuance of the habit should be
interpreted as silent proof that Mr. Wescott stood ready to defend
with all his might the Republican Party with its splendid principles
of “honest money and the chance to earn it.” These, however, logical
as they seemed, were only theories. Mr. Wescott himself afforded the
only source material, and that material was unfortunately impossible
of access, since the whole question with all its ramifications was one
which, Mrs. Wescott and her four children had tacitly agreed, was never
to be referred to whether in or out of the family circle.
It may easily be surmised that this habit of Mr. Wescott’s had been the
source of no little embarrassment to his wife and children, and their
splendid loyalty cannot, indeed, be too highly commended. Imagine, if
you will, any number of situations in which the recognition of such an
extraordinary practice might well have redounded to the discredit of
the family, and you will appreciate the truly fine material of which
these people were made. But as Mrs. Wescott said, again in confidence
to Mary and to Cynthia after she was ten, since they had endured the
visit of the Governor of Maine, they need have no fear as to anything
which the future might hold in store for them.
The gubernatorial guest dined with the Wescotts on an August noon when
Mary was eleven, just ten months, in fact, before the beginning of
the events which make up this story. He had communicated his nearness
to Mr. Wescott, who had hurried home at ten o’clock to warn his wife,
to change his clothes, and to decree blue serge for the children. As
Mrs. Wescott tied a new tie for him under a fresh collar, misgivings
would arise in spite of her, and more than once a warning trembled
on her lips. But she controlled herself, true even then to her sense
of loyalty, and reasonably secure in her faith that he could not, in
view of the distinction about to fall upon the family, so far forget
himself. Imagine, then, her distress when, an hour later, she saw her
husband conducting their distinguished guest up the street, his head
erect and crowned with the top hat which he had chosen for this unusual
occasion, his clean collar and new tie gently swinging from his left
hand! Imagine, too, the consternation of the children, who sat primly
on the front porch in Sunday serge, the girls in Mother Hubbards, the
boys as Lord Fauntleroyish as serge would admit, and rehearsed their
salutations. Can the mild remonstrance which sprang to Mrs. Wescott’s
lips as she stood in the doorway to receive her guest be wondered at?
“Father, how _could_ you!” she said in an undertone, after the
Governor had been duly presented. The accusing eyes of his four
children, who were engaged in making their curtsies and bows, added
poignancy to her thrust. His eyes followed their hostile glances, and
his cheeks colored. One could only believe that he, the author of their
disgrace, had been, up to this moment, entirely unconscious of the
incriminating articles in his hand.
It is extremely comforting, however, to be able to assure our readers
that no dire results followed this act, which we must believe to have
been quite unpremeditated on the part of Mr. Wescott. The Governor
having been shown upstairs by Mary Wescott to wash, he repaired hastily
to his own room, from whence he emerged almost simultaneously with
his honored guest, his appearance entirely conventional and his native
gallantry unimpaired. But although the dinner was a complete success
from every point of view, although upon his departure the Governor
assured his hostess in most lavish terms of his deep regard for her
husband, the ensuing legislative season was an anxious one for Mrs.
Wescott. Was it not possible, nay even probable, that habit might
assert itself even in the State capital? This fear so plucked at her
that she was tormented by frequent nightmares, in the worst of which
she saw her husband on a freezing winter day emerge from behind the
white marble pillars of the government building, descend the long
flight of steps, and walk through the city streets to his Augusta
hotel, his collar and tie in his hand. Her cries awoke Cynthia in the
next room, but to her startled questions her mother confessed only
vaguely to having seen in her sleep a most terrifying thing. Nor were
Cynthia’s far more insistent morning queries productive of anything
more definite.
Relief came in the shape of a legislator and friend from a neighboring
town, who, upon meeting Mrs. Wescott at a county convention of the
church, remarked in the course of conversation that she would never
know her husband in the ultra-dignified gentleman who lent tone to
the State Senate. Circumspect as were his words and uncompromising as
was his manner, Mrs. Wescott could only infer that he meant to allay
her fears, and the sense of freedom which she henceforth experienced,
in spite of her embarrassment at the time of the conversation, was
immeasurable.
Nor must we for a moment allow our readers to imagine that this habit,
which we have been at such pains to describe, had ever in the slightest
degree impaired the really enviable position which the Wescotts
maintained in the community. The energies of Mr. Wescott had been
dedicated, not merely to the affairs of his State and nation, but to
those of his native village as well. Her he had served, in the phrase
of the Scriptures, from his youth up. Fence-viewer and Pound-keeper at
twenty, he had passed successively through the lesser town offices
until now, on the fair side of forty, he was Moderator of the annual
Town Meeting, First Selectman, and, most honored of all positions,
Judge of the Municipal Court. Mrs. Wescott, in spite of the facts
that she had never played bridge in her life, that she belonged to no
Women’s Clubs and had never given an afternoon paper on “A Brief Survey
of English Literature,” and that woman suffrage, a measure at that time
in slight favor among some Western states, had received from her only a
kind of pitying amazement, was held in deepest respect by the village
at large and was, moreover, I dare say, a very happy woman--that is, as
women go. As for the four Wescott children, Mary, Cynthia, Roger, and
John, they were quite as promising as it is ever well or needful that
children should be.
And now to return to our exasperated story, which, for the last ten
minutes, has been fuming with impatience.
* * * * *
Years ago, on a certain warm day very early in the month of June, the
four Wescott children, who were swinging on a white gate beneath great
elm trees, were startled by the most curious and, for the duration of
a long half-hour, quite inexplicable behavior on the part of their
father. At high noon, just as the church clock was sending twelve
mellow, wavering notes down through the sunlit air to cling unseen
to tree-tops or to hide in daisy fields--at high noon he came up the
street in full view of all his neighbors, and halted with no apparent
embarrassment before his four awestruck children, _wearing his collar
and tie_!
They who had been too amazed to run to meet him in their usual fashion
silently opened the gate for him, all having dismounted and taken their
stand in twos on either side, Mary and Roger on the right, John and
Cynthia on the left. They could not be mistaken in their conviction
that something extraordinary had happened. Even John at five was so
sure that he asked not a question. He simply stared, round-eyed, at
his father’s neat throat. As for the others, they were conscious of a
suppressed excitement in their father’s manner, which, added to the
incriminating evidence of his unusual appearance, left not the shadow
of a doubt.
They continued to stare, now at him, now at one another, as he passed
through the gate without any suggestion that they follow him, and up
the driveway to the house. Whatever it was, he would tell their mother
first, and their part was to wait. This they did with their ears
strained for the slightest sound which might serve as a clue.
Their mother was bustling about in the kitchen, putting the finishing
touches to the dinner for which Mary and Cynthia had already set
the table. She was singing “Shall We Gather at the River,” but her
sweet, plaintive assurance that all the Wescotts would “gather with
the saints” was suddenly halted by the appearance of her husband in
the doorway. Listening outside, the children were quick to catch the
interruption. She was surprised, they knew, and they all felt for a
moment an unexpressed thrill of pride that they had first experienced
the sensation. Then--
“Why, Father!” they heard her say. Surely she also was not able to
believe her eyes!
A second or two of torturing silence, during which even breathing
was painful. Then the draft of the stove slammed shut,--to keep the
dinner from burning, they knew,--footsteps, and a streak of blue, their
mother’s gingham, through the windows of the dining-room, the closing
of a door. They knew what that meant. Their father had beckoned their
mother to the library, the seat of all family councils, punishments,
and Christmas secrets.
They might have talked then--perhaps it is singular that they did
not--but, since guesses seemed futile in the expectation of such a
stupendous happening as all things prophesied, they continued to stand
by the gate, staring alternately at one another and at the silent
windows of the library. It is altogether safe to predict, however, that
each of the four, from Mary to John, cast careful, inward glances over
the things each had been doing for the space of a week. There was none
of them who could not easily recall certain uncomfortable sessions
introduced in some such manner; and yet within the memory of none of
them had any misdemeanor, even of the most startling import, caused
such initial behavior from their father.
His sudden reappearance on the porch mercifully quieted certain
misgivings in the mind of Roger, who was beginning to realize that, if
he had counted ten, he should probably not have thrown the minister’s
son off the back fence into a burdock clump, and in the heart of
Cynthia, who had not felt right for a week because she had refused
to lend _Little Women_ to the Closson children, who, being the
offspring of a fisherman, smelt rather loathsomely of clams and fish.
He came down the driveway, walking rapidly, his collar and tie still in
their rightful places. As he passed the children by the white gate, he
paused for a moment.
“There’s company for dinner, children,” said he. “Please mind your
manners.”
They said, “Yes, sir” in a disappointed chorus. Although they had not
known exactly for what they were hoping, they all realized at once that
it was _not_ company for dinner. The announcement, in fact, was
like a dash of cold water. Roger made bold to question him.
“Is it the Governor again?” he asked.
“No,” answered his father. (Mary thought she detected here a slight
rise of color to his cheeks, a circumstance easily accounted for if our
readers will but recall that visit which brought such consternation in
the wake of its honor.) Then he passed quickly through the gate and
down the graveled sidewalk in the direction of his office.
The children looked at one another, all alike unwilling to recognize
that the very pleasurable suspense they had experienced must be
satisfied by a guest for dinner, probably by some neighboring lawyer,
who would talk about the tariff and keep them too long at the table.
But the older ones still clung hopefully to the strange air of mystery
about their father. That and the startling innovation in his appearance
could not, they told themselves, portend the usual dinner-guest.
“I suppose it will mean blue serge,” sighed Cynthia resignedly, “though
it’s much too hot.”
“I suppose it will,” said Mary.
“I can’t,” said Roger, all the time knowing that he could and would.
“There’s a baseball game at two--sharp.”
John said nothing, mostly because at five it takes all one’s time to
keep one’s mental balance in any such maelstrom of excitement as this.
Moreover, he knew he must do just as he was told.
“The Parker children all have new best dresses, made especially for
summer,” contributed Cynthia, “muslin with dots. That makes five apiece
for them.”
“It’s a silly extravagance,” said Mary. (The words and the opinion
belonged to her mother.) “Blue serge will do till Father gets the fall
election.”
But, to the surprise of all, the call to blue serge was not
forthcoming. They heard the draft of the stove opened, and smelt the
crisp, luscious odor of well-cooked meat and of freshly baked bread.
They heard their mother’s quick, sure steps going from kitchen to
dining-room and back again. Mary and Cynthia exchanged puzzled glances.
Neither could remember a time when they had not been called in to help
with the last things about the table.
“For, even if we’re not needed, what about the discipline?” thought
Mary.
The petals from the orchard trees beyond the driveway drifted through
the warm, bright air like great, lazy snowflakes. A pair of bluebirds
circled about in the white fragrance and in the drowsy murmur of bees.
And then Roger from the top of the gatepost gave a shout. He had seen
his father’s hat just topping the hill that led from the village.
“They’re coming--whoever it is!” he cried.
II
A BLUE GINGHAM AND AN ANCIENT LAND
They were coming! They topped the hill; they passed the academy
with its white columns and ancient date in gilded figures; they
passed the Blodgett house, within which Miss Sarah Blodgett peered
from the sidelights of the front entrance, mistrust and amazement
in her sharp face; they passed the church with its green shutters
and westward-pointing weathercock; they passed the crossroads where
Pleasant Street saunters across Maple; they entered upon that long
stretch of elm-shaded gravel walk, which, quite unimpaired by other
houses, leads to the Wescott gate. Still the four Wescotts by that gate
said not one word or made the slightest move toward going to meet their
father. Indeed, they were quite too busily engaged in trying to set
their mental houses to rights to do anything but stare. And stare they
did!
Their father was coming up the street, laden with a huge and shining
black bag or pack, which he carried most awkwardly by means of bands
across one shoulder. By his side walked the strangest person the four
Wescotts had ever seen. She was tall, and the queer folds of her black
dress gave place above the waist to a velvet bodice of the same color,
only laced with gold cord that tied at the throat. Her sleeves were
full and white, and their edges of lace fell almost over her dark,
long-fingered hands. They could see that her hair was as black and
shining as her bodice or as the covering of her great bundle, for the
handkerchief of red silk which had once covered it had fallen back
and lay on her shoulders. They saw, too, the gold coins, suspended in
tiny rings of gold, that hung from her ears, and the string of great
red stones around her neck. Then, as she came nearer and they stared
more breathlessly than ever, Roger at the coins, John at the necklace,
Cynthia and Mary at the gold-laced bodice and peculiar sleeves,
they saw that she had soft, dark eyes such as they had never seen
before--eyes which, they somehow all at once knew, had looked upon
things unfamiliar and far away.
At the gate their father recalled them to their senses.
“Children, this is our new friend, Mary Christmas,” he said, lifting
the latch, and allowing his guest to precede him into the driveway.
“Come and speak to her.”
They came forward then with the bows and curtsies which had been, as
far back as they could remember, the necessary accompaniment to the
reception of all visitors; but they were surprised almost to the point
of being startled when this dark stranger with the great eyes bent
suddenly and kissed the hands which they gave to her, at the same time
murmuring unfamiliar words.
It was just at the moment when Mary Christmas kissed the dimple between
the second and third finger of John’s square little hand that Mary
Wescott saw something which the others had quite overlooked. There were
traces of tears on the brown face of their guest--quite unmistakable,
tiny paths, which, dry as they now were, bore certain and tragic proof
in their downward course across her smooth cheeks. And as Mary Wescott
stared at those barely discernible lines, a singular thing happened to
her. She who had seen tears and the traces of them in plenty during
her twelve years began to feel suddenly as though she had never really
seen them before in all her life. Those dry, white stains on the face
of Mary Christmas were doing a strange thing to her, which she did not
understand or like at all. They were shutting out all the people about
her, her father, John, Roger, Cynthia, even Mary Christmas herself, the
sunlight, the drifting petals of apple blossoms, and in their places
were trying to show her Things which were not things at all. They were
making her dimly aware that the sorrows in the world, the pitiful
sufferings of the aged, the bewildering anguish of young people, the
broken hearts of little children, are all a part of a great mantle of
sorrow that encircles the whole wide earth in its dark, smothering
folds. She drew back frightened; but just at that moment her mother, in
blue gingham, appeared on the front steps.
Now that blue gingham was a wonder-working fabric. It chased away
the Things that Mary Wescott might have seen, and kept her a little
girl for a whole year longer. The suddenness of it there on the porch
brought back her father and the others, and, in spite of a peculiar
clutching at her throat and the entirely absurd idea that she had been
away somewhere, made her quite herself again. So when John, suddenly
freeing himself from Cynthia’s grasp, ran boldly after Mary Christmas
and his father and, to the astonishment of everyone, put his hand in
the dark one of the stranger to lead her to his mother, she could
follow with Roger and Cynthia, smiling at his unaccustomed friendliness
and sharing their eager excitement in each new happening of this most
extraordinary occasion.
That dinner and the afternoon hours that followed were memorable ones
in Wescott history. Mary Christmas sat at the table in the seat of
honor at their father’s right, those disturbing marks of tears quite
washed from her face, the red silk handkerchief tied neatly over her
dark hair. Appetites languished among the Wescott children; and for
once penalties were mercifully withheld from those who could eat no
potato. Four pairs of eyes traveled from headdress to gold lacings,
from brown cheeks, now flushed with color, to long brown fingers; four
pairs of ears strained to detect among the broken, rhythmic fragments
of her speech familiar everyday words that they could understand.
Mary Christmas talked not only with her lips. She talked with her
brows, her eyes, her hands, her whole body, in a mighty effort to
convey by means of harsh, newly found words the story of her life to
these, her new friends. Her country lay far across the ocean, across
warm inland seas and great sand-swept deserts. It was a high land of
tumbling, rockbound red hills and towering, snow-crowned mountains,
of broad valleys with streams, of wide, treeless pastures--the homes
of thousands of sheep. It was a land of bitter winters and dry, hot
summers, thick with dust, which the wind whirled in great storms from
the bordering deserts. Against the cold of those winters the people dug
their homes in the sloping hillsides, long narrow houses with space
for both men and animals, houses roofed with sods and partitioned with
stones; and these dwellings were proof also against the hot, parching
winds of summer. It was a land over which people had passed for
centuries, people of many races, one succeeding another in the march
of years, all journeying from the East to the West--hordes of people,
sweeping onward with the mercilessness of locusts or of the country’s
own burning wind. It was a land where in the spring snow-fed streams
glistened on the high mountain-sides and slipped crystal clear through
the valleys, with here and there the sound of tiny silver bells. Above
all, it was the oldest land in all the world--older than India, than
Egypt, than China with her walled towns, older than Jerusalem with
Solomon’s Temple, older than the white, ancient cities of Assyria and
Babylonia. Its red hills and snowy mountains and wide pastures and
clear rivers had been there when Methuselah rounded his nine-hundredth
year, and when Enoch took his solemn walk with God.
Mary Christmas loved this land. Even John understood that. When she
talked of its clear waters and of its wandering flocks of sheep, a
wistfulness haunted her voice like a melody; when she explained to the
puzzled children how great bands of people had again and again laid
it waste and desolate, numberless years before they were born, the
sadness of long centuries burdened her words; when she spoke of its
great age, her tones echoed like those of the organ at church, until
in one supreme outburst of reverence she rose from her chair, her face
uplifted, her arms spread wide after the manner of the ancient prophet
in benediction upon his people.
But even as she stood with outstretched arms and glowing face, a
change came over her features. The children saw it coming, and the
awe in which they had listened, wide-eyed, to her description of this
far-off, ancient land gave way to a kind of enchanting anticipation of
what might happen next. The sorrowful lines about her mouth hardened
until they became almost cruel; her long nose, with the bend in it so
peculiarly unlike any that they had seen, widened at the nostrils with
the great breaths which she was drawing; the sad yearning which had
softened her eyes faded as a candle burns itself out in a dark room,
and into the blackness of their depths there came an ominous red gleam.
She was no longer a poet, a patriot, or a prophet. She was one who
hates, bitterly, relentlessly.
Now her voice rose like the rising wind on the bare plains of her own
land.
“I live there. I play--like him--like her--like you all. I chase birds
and catch falling blossoms in my hair. Then I grow up. I go to a great
city--to Erzerum.” To the listening children this strange word boomed
like the sound of the town drum on Memorial Day. “I marry there--a good
man. We have two children--a girl, a boy. My husband, he buy silks,
laces, jewels, all beautiful from Persia, and sell them. We are happy.
Then a year ago--when the blossoms fall--like this--the Turks come.
They run through Erzerum--their horses run! They kill--they kill--they
_kill_!”
Her words ended in a high succession of convulsive liquid notes. Her
hands, which she had clasped above her head as her story mounted into
tragedy, twined and knotted themselves together. For a moment grief
dulled the ominous red gleam in her eyes, and the children saw with
consternation that they swam with tears. But the tears did not fall,
much to Mary Wescott’s relief. The hard lines came back around her
mouth. Again her nostrils quivered.
“They kill my husband. They want to kill me and my children--but my
husband--he hide us in a cave where he keep the silks and jewels.
They do not find us. If they find us--_I_ kill--one--two--three!
_I_ kill because they kill my husband!”
The fascinated children stared, half frightened, now at their guest who
dared to use a word so tremendous in its import, and who, moreover,
they felt sure, was entirely capable of its actual embodiment, now
at their parents, between whom they had caught in passing certain
questioning glances. Their father and mother, it must be admitted, were
experiencing not a few misgivings at this bloodthirsty turn in Mary
Christmas’ recital; for although they had not made a scientific study
of the child from the embryo to the beginning of adolescence, they
understood quite as clearly as modern parents that there are several
things of which children may just as well remain in ignorance.
It was John who came to the rescue with quite the most satisfactory
thing that ever happened. When the old clock on the mantel had ticked
away those few monstrous, weighty seconds during which the Wescott
children were about to embark their thoughts on perilous, uncharted
seas, during which Mr. Wescott fruitlessly searched for new topics of
conversation and Mrs. Wescott feared that her husband, for once in his
life, had made a mistake in judgment, during which Mary Christmas sat
with her hands knotted above her head and her revengeful words echoing
in the still room, John suddenly knew exactly what to do. Nor was this
strange if one stops to think about it. John was five years old--only a
few short years removed from those light-filled days when he had known
Everything. Perhaps some shadowy recollection of those days, some sense
of that which was then luminous and orderly, came stealing upon him
like the faint fragrance of violets in a fresh spring rain. Perhaps it
was the knowledge which he had then--which we all have, but so soon
forget--that made him suddenly understand the nothingness of hatred and
revenge.
But explanations at best are tiresome things. The important fact now
is, not how he knew what to do, but that he did it. He slipped from
his chair on the other side of his mother, crossed the room behind his
father, and walked straight into Mary Christmas’ lap with its ample
folds of black. He must have walked straight into her heart, too, and
driven out everything else but himself, for her arms came down and
went around him, and her sudden tears made ultramarine spots on his
blue gingham blouse. Then Mr. Wescott blew his nose mightily, and Mrs.
Wescott fussed with the tea things, and Mary and Cynthia alike felt
their throats grow big to bursting, and Roger shook a threatening fist
at the surprised head of the baseball captain which had appeared in the
window. And it all ended by Mary Christmas’ telling them of Raphael
and little Mary, aged respectively five and seven, who were staying
with their aunt in Erzerum until their mother could earn enough money
to bring them across the ocean to America.
“To Portland,” explained Father Wescott to the children. “That’s where
Mary Christmas lives now, when she’s not traveling about.”
The four Wescotts knew Portland. For years, in fact up to this very
minute, they had held it in highest esteem. It was the largest city
as well as one of the oldest in the State of Maine; it had been the
scene of a battle in the Revolutionary War; it was the birthplace of
their favorite poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They had dreamed of
going with their father some day to see Portland--its fort, the gray
battleships in its wide harbor, the room in which Mr. Longfellow was
born. Now all at once it had become a charmless place. Its years were
but moments in the light of the centuries which had passed over the
land of Mary Christmas; its single combat meaningless and trifling
compared with the numberless battles which had succeeded one another
upon those hoary plains. Even its Mr. Longfellow, venerable, indeed
patriarchal as he looked in the school readers, was simply out of it
when lined up for inspection between Methuselah and Enoch! Portland,
heretofore a dream city, had, in view of this recent knowledge, become
as dull, stale, and familiar as their own village. The one lure that it
now possessed was the fact that Mary Christmas had chosen it as her new
home.
“And now,” said Mary Christmas, all dark things faded from her face,
“now I give gifts. Come!”
III
UNBURIED TREASURE
She rose from the table, still holding John by the hand, and led the
way into the library, on the floor of which lay the great black bundle,
like a mysterious treasure from a story-book of wonders. The excited
children stood at the four points of the compass while with their
father’s help she unbound the cords that held it in place. At last the
shining black cover opened, disclosing yet other bundles which in their
turn must be undone. The few slow seconds which the great clock in
the corner ticked away seemed like hours before these smaller bundles
disclosed their motley contents upon the library floor.
Here were household necessities of every sort from paring-knives,
metal dishcloths, and packages of tacks to needles, thimbles, and
spools of thread; articles of clothing--overalls, elastic suspenders,
underwear for children, hairpins, dozens of pairs of stockings,
collars of celluloid and linen, hair ribbons of entrancing colors,
shoe laces, safety pins and pins that were not safe, tape measures,
soap, scissors, tooth powder--all the hundred-and-one indispensable
things for which families in the outlying districts of New England in
those pre-Ford days of the nineties were often at a loss. Here were
toys,--rubber dolls, rattles, spinning tops, blocks, bouncing balls,
and jumping-ropes with shining, many-colored handles of wood,--toys
for the birthdays of some Maine farmer’s children whose father could
not get easily to town. And here, too, in a far recess of the smallest
inside bundle, just as in the last and most precious box of an Arabian
Night’s treasure chest, were certain intriguing parcels wrapped in
fantastic, figured papers of blue and green and gold--parcels that sent
out into the Wescott library, as on the wings of some invisible bird, a
rich, spicy fragrance that made one suddenly oblivious of the stockings
and the safety pins.
It was from these fascinating packages that Mary Christmas selected
her gifts--that is, for all but Roger, whose longing eyes had never
left a certain red-handled jumping-rope even when that strange, heavy
fragrance had floated through the room. To Mary Wescott she gave a
sewing-case in glossy black wood, inlaid with tiny flowers and birds
of mother-of-pearl in delightful confusion. A tiny golden key, which
held all the magic of golden keys everywhere, unlocked it with an
unmistakable click, and the lifted cover revealed compartments with all
manner of colored silks and threads, a pair of shining scissors, and
a silver thimble. There must have been magic, indeed, in that golden
key, as anyone would have suspected, for as Mary Wescott looked at the
inside and tried on the thimble, she wondered how darning her stockings
could ever have seemed a task.
For Cynthia there was the most entrancing napkin ring, of that
loveliest shade of blue which makes one think of far-away hills in a
September haze and of tall spikes of larkspur in the gathering dusk;
and it, too, bore flowers whose inlaid petals and tiny, sparkling
leaves formed a wreath around the ring. Could she ever again, she
wondered as she fingered it, think folding her napkin irksome or
needless?
When John’s turn came, Mary Christmas stood still for a moment and
looked at him, standing sturdily apart from the others in his blue
gingham suit, his chubby hands behind him, his wide, inquiring eyes
intent upon her face. Then she laughed, like the sound of the spring
streams in her own land, and drew out yet another package from the
farthest recess of all. Turning her back, she laughed again, softly,
as she undid the paper. Then, suddenly facing them, she took two quick
steps toward John, and placed over his curly head and around his soft
cheeks a silk cap made of the most bewildering colors in orderly rows
and topped by the most piquant of gold tassels. What wonder that
everyone applauded then, even to the baseball team that had been
surreptitiously watching proceedings for a full hour from various
stations about the porch and beneath the windows! For John in blue
gingham, his cheeks flushed to a bright pink, his brown eyes shining
with excitement and pleasure, some tendrils of golden hair escaping
from the silken band of his new cap, which might have graced the dark
head of some Eastern prince, was quite too rare a sight to be received
in silence!
Mrs. Wescott was so engrossed in her youngest child that she was quite
taken off her guard when her present came. She was trying to stifle
a wish, which seemed to her vain and extravagant, namely, that some
great painter might make a portrait of John in his new cap, when she
became suddenly aware of something enfolding her like a white, fragrant
mist. And there she was in Mary Christmas’ present, with her children
laughing at the surprise on her face and her husband standing in amazed
admiration beside her.
It was a shawl, but such a one as no Wescott had ever looked upon.
At first its lacy fretwork seemed indistinct and fantastic, like the
frost on a January windowpane. But as the children with careful fingers
lifted portions of it to look through its tiny squares and to marvel
at its fineness, they saw that pictures were woven within it--pictures
in delicate traceries of birds, butterflies, and flowers. Then Mary
Christmas swept it suddenly from their mother’s shoulders and held it
widespread against her black skirt; and lo! across the high centre
of it a flock of birds was winging its way as though across great
stretches of sky. In the lower centre swarms of butterflies danced and
hovered and poised among hundreds of flowers. But the corners, as Mary
Christmas showed them each in turn, were the most wonderful of all. In
the first, some tired sheep rested under a great tree; in the second,
the moon and stars looked down upon a silent hill; a child danced
in the third among falling flower-petals; in the last, a branching
rosebush clambered over a high wall and sent sprays of swaying blossoms
into some hidden garden. And as they looked at it and marveled, that
same richly laden fragrance stole from it like an invisible presence
and drifted away up the wide-mouthed fireplace, among the musty leaves
of their father’s old books, and through the open window into the June
sunlight.
“I made it,” said Mary Christmas, throwing it again over Mrs. Wescott’s
shoulders; “some in Erzerum, some in Portland last winter--I made it.
Now it is yours!”
“I can’t take it,” cried Mrs. Wescott, finding her voice with a great
effort. “It’s too lovely for me--and all that work, too! John, tell her
I can’t take it.”
But Mr. Wescott, astute in so many things, was really positively stupid
about that shawl. He just stood and stared at his wife quite as though
he had not seen her nearly every day for thirteen years, and made only
the feeblest of protests as a weak echo to her own. Mary Christmas paid
not the slightest heed to their remonstrances, except to shake her
hands in a peculiarly final gesture. She was wholly concerned now with
her gift for Mr. Wescott.
Now Father Wescott afforded a real problem. For him whom Mary Christmas
most delighted to honor, what gift among all the articles in her great
bundle was in the least suitable? She made a puzzled movement toward
the stockings and suspenders, but drew back dissatisfied. She fingered
cards of cuff buttons, combs in leather pockets, collars of all sorts,
only to drop them almost immediately. The fragrant, figured parcels
offered no solution. Obviously they contained nothing for a gentleman.
Then an idea came to Mary Christmas which made her halt in the
inspection of her wares and laugh in glad relief. She knew now the very
thing for Father Wescott, the thing that would suggest to him always
the depths of her gratitude. With another of her quick movements she
loosed the red necklace about her throat and threw it impulsively
over the head of Mr. Wescott. It lay across his white collar and on
the bosom of his white shirt, red as the geraniums in the porch tubs
outside or as great drops of blood. And as Mary Christmas saw the
stones pulsating there below Mr. Wescott’s surprised, embarrassed face,
she did a most peculiar thing. She threw herself face downward on the
library floor and kissed the self-polished toe of his shoe!
The four Wescotts were quite at a loss as to how to receive this last
event in such a long and overwhelming train. The laugh had died away on
Mary Christmas’ lips before she had thrown herself at their father’s
feet. Apparently, then, the situation was not to be considered
humorous. And yet the expression on their father’s face, to the older
ones at least, banished seriousness. He had been sufficiently ill at
ease when Mary Christmas had thrown the beads about his neck, but now
that she lay prostrate before him, the embarrassment on his face had
given place to a kind of empty foolishness which was irresistibly
funny. So, in spite of the warning glances of their mother, they
laughed--laughs which were echoed and re-echoed by the baseball team,
and in which Mary Christmas, raising herself from the floor, joined,
perhaps a little tolerantly.
Mr. Wescott then went to the stable, somewhat, it must be admitted,
after the manner of one escaping from a situation, to harness the
horses preparatory to carrying their guest and her great bundle a few
miles on their way; and in his absence, while Mary Christmas tied up
her wares in neat packages and placed them for wrapping in the black
oilcloth, Mrs. Wescott explained to the children the reason for this
singular expression of her gratitude.
Appearing suddenly that morning in the yard of a house on the outskirts
of the village, she had startled the inmates, who were quite unused to
peddlers of her description, into the fear that, with her dark face,
uncertain speech, strange gestures, and outlandish clothing, she must
mean evil--thievery, kidnapping, or worse. Suspicious and impulsive
by nature, they had not stayed to question her, but, hailing the town
sheriff who by ill luck was passing by, had demanded that she be taken
before the judge to answer for misdeeds contemplated if, fortunately,
not performed. Such had been the source of her anxious tears, the
traces of which had so nearly troubled Mary Wescott, and such the
occasion which had prompted Mr. Wescott, secure in her innocence, to
protect and befriend her.
They drove away a few minutes later, Mr. Wescott holding the reins and
Mary Christmas beside him, her great bundle securely tied to the back
of the carriage. The children waved them up the hill and out of sight,
repeating to themselves her farewell words:--
“Next year when the roads are dry and the petals fall--like this--I
come again. You wait--for me?”
That night every Wescott dreamed of Mary Christmas. Mr. Wescott
sat quite up in bed, declaiming indignantly his very words of that
morning to her stupid accusers, and aroused Mrs. Wescott, who for
what seemed hours had been enduring the hardships of a Monday in
an Armenian kitchen. Roger killed three monstrous Turks, alone and
single-handed, to avenge the death of Mary Christmas’ husband; while
John was a shepherd boy, tending his sheep in wide pastures and
wearing a many-colored cap, at which all of his silly sheep laughed
again and again. As for Mary and Cynthia, they spent the night in a
whirl of excitement in which Methuselah and Enoch strove to enlist
Mr. Longfellow’s assistance in a headlong rush against hordes of
barbarians. The State of Maine bard, however, obstinately declined to
be “up and doing”; indeed, he proved himself worse than useless in the
heat of the encounter, although he doubtless realized more fully than
ever before the earnestness and the reality of life!
IV
A WILD CRAB-APPLE TREE
That winter, which everyone called an “old-fashioned” one because the
harbor was frozen for miles toward the open sea and the snow blocked
the roads in great, curving drifts, they planned and replanned the
journey which Mary Christmas would make in the spring. Often in the
evening, when the supper dishes were washed and put away, when Mr.
Wescott was lost in the _Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan_ and the boys
were popping corn over the glowing embers in the deep fireplace, Mrs.
Wescott, Mary, and Cynthia would trace her way in the family atlas,
which had been purchased at some sacrifice because it featured the
State of Maine.
Leaving Portland, her great pack bulging with her wares, she would
doubtless take the road to Brunswick, the seat of Bowdoin College,
that venerable institution which had been the Alma Mater alike of
Mr. Longfellow and of Father Wescott. From thence she would follow
the coast, passing through Wiscasset, which held the oldest deed in
America in its courthouse, through the friendly towns of Newcastle
and Damariscotta, through Belfast and Searsport, once famous for
their sea captains and for their gracious, white-winged clippers.
The roads that she would travel would be like those they knew--roads
that climbed rocky, fir-clad hills and at their summits gave one
far-reaching stretches of sea with surf-swept islands and towering
white lighthouses; lonely by-roads that led to scraggly farms and
gray farmhouses, where lived people who fought a losing fight against
the barren land; elm-shaded village roads bordered by green-shuttered
houses and by white gates like their own. She would cross the wide
Penobscot where it narrowed enough to encourage a ferry, and, passing
through Bucksport with its gray fort and old graveyard, would come
by easy stages over dark, tumbling hills, on which great shadows
alternately marched and rested, to their own village.
“Only you can never be quite sure,” said Father Wescott, forsaking P.
H. Sheridan, “that she won’t come through Castine. With summer visitors
there, she ought to sell a lot of that hand-stuff.”
Then Mary Christmas’ route must be retraced just in case she did choose
Castine; and they continued to bend over the map until the sharp, warm
smell of burned pop-corn arrested their attention.
“Dear me, boys!” cried Mrs. Wescott. “Can’t you manage just one
popperful without so many old maids and burned ones?”
Mr. Wescott said nothing, but the face that he again raised from P.
H. Sheridan was mildly remonstrant. He was what people called in the
nineties “a great hand” for hot buttered pop-corn.
At half-past eight, filled with pop-corn and a drowsy content, they
went to bed to dream of Mary Christmas, while the bitterness of the
cold made a solitude of the village, and the lighted windows, one by
one, faded into the darkness without.
But just before the roads were really dry from the spring mud, before
the falling of the apple blossoms told them that they might begin
to watch with some certainty of fulfillment, something happened to
the eldest of the Wescotts. It was, in fact, the same curious Thing
to which she had been exposed on the day of Mary Christmas’ arrival,
but from which she had been saved by the fortunate intervention of
her mother’s blue gingham. This time, however, the attack came when
she was alone. She had gone into a near-by pasture to hunt for early
violets, and on the way home had climbed to the top of a great boulder,
from whence she could look far out over the fields and woods. It was a
favorite resting-place of hers, and until this particular day she had
experienced only pleasure and satisfaction in the exertion of the stiff
climb up the rock, in the sense of accomplishment when she had reached
the top, when she could rest her warm, tired body against the trunk of
a stunted pine and look out over the country. Through a vista in the
fir trees she could see a sloping hillside in the vivid green of early
spring, and on its summit a wild crab-apple tree, standing against the
bluest sky imaginable and flushed with the pink of opening petals.
Then it happened! The beauty of that wild crab-apple, in which for
years she had taken only pleasure, began to hurt her with a pain as
real and sharp as any other pain. Before this it had been just a lovely
thing to which their father had pointed with his cane, so that they
might not miss it as they walked on a Sunday afternoon. Now, in one
incomprehensible instant, it had become lovely unto tears!
Mary Wescott was almost frightened as she sat on the boulder and looked
at the crab-apple tree. She was vaguely fearful lest this sadness which
its sudden beauty had made her feel would stay with her and lend an
aching loveliness to other long-accustomed, perfectly familiar things.
The years from thirteen on seemed all at once dim, perilous ways to
her. If one were made to feel pain and sadness by things which had
hitherto given only joy, how could one walk safely through the weeks
and months to come?
Feeling a sudden longing for the security of the Wescott kitchen and
the very tangible occupation of setting the table, she climbed down
the boulder and ran all the way home. She did not say anything to her
mother about the crab-apple tree; she was beginning, curiously enough,
to understand that there are Things that people do not tell, even to
mothers. Mrs. Wescott, however, was a wise woman. Although she brought
up her children before temperaments were discovered or Child Guidance
Clinics and project methods were invented, she knew perfectly well that
Mary’s age was an Age of Discovery; and when she saw Mary’s eyes she
gave her an extra dose of sulphur and molasses, and suggested that they
spend the afternoon making candy for the church sale.
But when two weeks later the drifting petals and the well-dried roads
brought Mary Christmas once more over the hill, and they all ran to
meet her with glad shouts, Mary Wescott looked at her with different
eyes. For she saw in Mary Christmas what she never could have seen
if the crab-apple tree had not finished what the traces of tears had
begun.
V
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
That second visit of Mary Christmas always stood out in the Wescott
mind as being particularly satisfying. In the first place, there
were no formalities of introduction or of early acquaintance to be
undergone. In other words, they could get right down to the business
at hand, which was, as everyone must know, the asking of questions
concerning that ancient and distant land the charm of which Mary
Christmas had upon her first visit only suggested. Moreover, a year
had wrought much improvement in Mary Christmas’ speech. Now there was
little necessity to strain one’s ears for familiar words; in fact,
there were few words that were unfamiliar. Only the curious rhythm in
her voice had not changed, or the deep, rich tones that rose and fell
with her changes of mood, or the lingering softness which she gave to
especially loved words.
Nor was she averse to talking. After dinner, while their father
interviewed a client in the library and their mother did some leftover
household tasks, the children gathered around her in the warm sunlight
of the orchard, white and fragrant with its falling blossoms, and asked
the questions they had vainly asked one another all winter long.
“Is it really the oldest country in all the world, Mary
Christmas--older than the Garden of Eden?”
Mary Christmas looked at them all as though she were trying to bridge
the gulf between them and her, between their land and her own. There
were time and agony in her eyes. Mary Wescott saw them there, though
she did not know their names--wise, brooding, long-suffering things
that were more ancient even than Mary Christmas’ land.
“Is it really the oldest country in all the world, Mary
Christmas--older than the Garden of Eden?”
“It _is_ the Garden of Eden,” said Mary Christmas, smiling at the
slow surprise that crept over their faces. “God made it the first of
any land after He had parted the waters. He was tired of looking at
just water, and so He made land. That was my land, where Erzerum is
now--the Garden of Eden.”
“Where Adam and Eve lived, Mary Christmas? And all the trees in the
world?”
“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. “Trees white like these by the rivers, and
blossoms blowing through the air when the spring comes after the long
winter.”
“And the Tree of Life, Mary Christmas? Is that in Erzerum, even now?”
“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. But her eyes grew dark when she told them
that, and she would not describe the Tree of Life.
They were all quiet then for a few moments. The idea of anyone’s having
lived in the Garden of Eden was quite too staggering. John particularly
could not get things straight in his mind. Was Mary Christmas so old
that, like the Garden of Eden, she was ageless? She who had seen the
Tree of Life, was it not likely that she, too, had walked in the cool
of the day with God and Adam and Eve?
“What’s the next oldest thing in your land, Mary Christmas?” It was
Roger who asked this question. The Garden of Eden with Mary Christmas
in it was too much for him. Like John, he could not get it clear, and
he was hoping now for something less overwhelming.
“The next oldest thing?” repeated Mary Christmas, as though all time
were passing in slow review before her. “A great mountain is the next
oldest thing, the highest mountain in the world, almost, with snow on
it all the year. It rises from the plain--so.” With her quick, brown
fingers she gathered handfuls of the fallen petals and piled them on a
flat, bare place near the tree trunk. The children helped her silently
by scooping up more petals from among the grass and giving them to her.
“So--it goes up from the plain into Heaven, white with snow. It is a
holy mountain. It is where Noah landed with the ark, after the rain
fell forty days and forty nights.”
“I know,” said Roger. “Mount Ararat. It’s in the Bible.”
“It’s in the geography, too,” said Cynthia.
“Ararat,” repeated Mary Christmas slowly. “Masis, my people call it.
Well, Noah landed there after all the rain had fallen. One morning the
ark stopped and shook them all. And there they were! The water began
to go down--quickly--and there was my land--the oldest land in all the
world!”
Again John was puzzled. Mary Christmas and her land were so inseparable
that it almost seemed as though she must have been there to show its
high pastures and clear waters to Shem, Ham, and Japheth, while Noah’s
wife tidied up the ark before leaving it, and Noah anxiously loosed the
beasts, clean and unclean alike, determined that this time there should
be no hitch in the starting of a new world.
“What became of the ark?” asked Roger. He had a detail-loving mind.
“The Bible doesn’t say.”
Mary Christmas looked at them all without replying. Perhaps she
hesitated to supplement the Bible; perhaps she was preparing them for
the effect of her answer.
“The ark is still there on the top of the mountain.” She spoke slowly
and solemnly. “God keeps it there to make the people good. No one can
see it, but it is there. When the moon shines on the mountain or the
sun on certain days, there is its great shadow.”
“Oh, but, Mary Christmas! Still there, after all those thousands of
years?”
“I tell you the truth,” said Mary Christmas. There was finality in her
tone. “There is its shadow on the mountain-side.”
“Have you seen its shadow, Mary Christmas--you--yourself?”
“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. And then she did a strange thing. Raising
her right hand to her head, she touched her forehead lightly with her
fingers, then her breast, and then her shoulders from left to right,
closing her eyes as she did so. Her still face awed the children. They
had never seen that sign before.
“But what if anyone should climb the mountain to its very top?” they
persisted, breaking the silence once she had opened her eyes. “Couldn’t
they see it if it is there?”
“No,” said Mary Christmas. “Only someone holy could see it--someone
very, very good. The Virgin Mary--or, perhaps, your father.”
Years afterward they were to laugh at the remembrance of Mary
Christmas’ words and at the picture of Father Wescott toiling up Ararat
with all the zeal which he had ever shown on the eve of a Republican
victory. But now they were impressed only by the reverence in her
voice. Good and wise as they had always known their father to be, they
had never thought him fit for such celestial company.
“Once a saint, a holy man, tried to climb the mountain to see the ark,”
continued Mary Christmas. “That was hundreds of years ago. His name was
Saint Jacob. For three days he went up and up through the snow and ice.
But each morning, when he woke from sleep, he found himself back at
the same place where he had started the day before. Then an angel came
to him with a great plank of wood. The angel told Saint Jacob that God
would let no one walk on the top of the mountain, for it was sacred;
but that He had sent the saint a piece of the ark as a reward for his
patience. And now that wood is in the great church at Etchmiadzin.”
“Say it again, Mary Christmas,” they begged, forgetting Saint Jacob and
the ark in this unfamiliar, ringing word. “Say it again--_please_!”
She repeated it, and they said it after her, against those days when
they should retell her stories to one another and to all their friends.
“Have you seen the wood yourself, Mary Christmas, in the great church?”
“I have touched it with my hand,” said Mary Christmas, again pausing
a moment to make that mysterious sign on forehead and breast. “Once,
when I was a little girl like Mary and Cynthia, I was ill. I could not
walk or play. My father took me to Etchmiadzin--a long journey in a
donkey-cart. I remember how tired I got and how my bones ached. When we
came to Etchmiadzin, we went straight to the great church inside the
high walls. It was dark, with lights only at the great altar, and sweet
smells everywhere. The priest there told me to place my hand on the
wood. Then he made a prayer, and I was well again. On the way back home
I sprang from the cart and ran ahead of the donkey. My father--he cried
for joy!”
Mary and Cynthia looked at Mary Christmas’ hand, which lay in her
lap, motionless for a moment, as she noted the effect of her story
upon them. That long-fingered hand which was strained and knotted and
bruised from the weight of her great bundle, which had yearned to hold
an avenging weapon and to shed blood, which had woven birds and stars,
tired sheep and climbing roses into their mother’s shawl--that hand
had, years ago, touched a piece of the ark of Noah, and had felt within
itself the quickening sense of returning health. The thought was too
immense and far-reaching for them. They needed weeks and months to be
able to comprehend it.
“In the church at Etchmiadzin there are other holy, sacred things,”
continued Mary Christmas, her voice lingering over her words. “There is
the head of the spear which the soldiers put into the side of our Lord.
Then in a great silver box there is the hand of holy Saint Gregory. He
was the saint who lived down a well for thirteen years.”
“For thirteen years!” cried Roger, disbelief punctuating his words. “In
a well! Oh, Mary Christmas!”
“He did,” said Mary Christmas. “I tell you the truth just as they told
it to me when I was a little girl. A wicked king cast him into the well
because he would not give up his faith. And there he stayed, holding
tight to the rocks so that he might not slip into the black, terrible
water. There were serpents in that water. They reached their heads
toward him! But when he made the sign of the cross they slipped back
again. It was the same with all the other creeping things. They fled
before that holy sign!”
“What did he eat all those years, Mary Christmas?”
“A widow woman who lived near the well lowered food to him in a basket
every night at midnight. One night the king’s soldiers caught her. They
would have put her to death if holy Gregory had not heard her cries and
called from his well. They heard him call and mocked him. Then God
sent an angel from Heaven who changed them all, and the king too, into
wild boars, and threw a veil over the woman so that they could not find
her.
“Then, when God knew that Gregory was good and patient enough to be a
saint, He sent another angel to the wicked king’s sister, and commanded
her to bring Gregory up out of the well. And when they lowered cords
and drew the saint up, he was black like a man from Africa! The first
thing he did was to put his hands on the horns of the boar who had been
the king. The horns faded away, and the king came back. And Gregory
said, ‘I am building a church for God in Etchmiadzin. Will you give
gold and jewels?’ And the king said, ‘Yes.’”
“And the great silver box, Mary Christmas? What about that?”
Then Mary Christmas told them that when Saint Gregory died they cut
off his right hand, which had wrought such wonders, and placed it in
a silver box in the great church. The hand still wrought wonders, for
when sick and suffering people and those who were troubled with care
and sin came to Etchmiadzin and knelt and touched the box, they were
healed. Then, she said, there was a certain good bishop who was much
worried in his mind over an old sin in his boyhood--a sin which most
persons would have forgotten. But he could not forget it. All his life
he had wanted to atone for it in some more satisfactory way than just
by holy living. When he saw the miracles wrought by the hand of the
saint, he thought of the most satisfactory way in all the world.
One night, when all was still within the high walls of the cathedral
square in Etchmiadzin, he laid aside his bishop’s robes and put on the
gray gown and hood of a pilgrim. He went to the dark church with its
dim altar lights, and took the silver box, which he wrapped in purple
velvet and bound with cords of gold. Kneeling by the altar in the
stillness, he consecrated himself to purity of thought and act and,
with the aid of holy Saint Gregory, to the service of God among those
who most needed Him.
He did not know just where he was going, Mary Christmas told them;
but once he was outside the wall, some Power led him where It would.
It took him far beyond cities and towns to high, wind-swept plains,
where rough men wandered with their flocks and herds, and to secluded
mountain villages whose people knew nothing of Etchmiadzin and its
great church, and had never heard of the good saint. Among these people
and in these villages the pilgrim lingered, and wherever he saw sorrow
or sickness, he would take the silver box with its rich covering of
purple and gold from beneath his shabby cloak and show it to those
who needed help. Here the power of the saint was greater even than at
Etchmiadzin, for those in suffering or anxiety needed but to look upon
the box, and they were straightway healed.
Most wonderful of all, the saint gave his miraculous help not only to
people but to animals and flowers. For once when the tired pilgrim
rested on the top of a high, silent hill and sang a psalm to God, he
chanced to see a lamb that had fallen and was caught between two rocks.
Carefully placing the silver box on the hillside, he hurried to help
the poor creature. But as he drew near, he saw to his amazement the
rocks that held the lamb separate, and the animal spring to its feet
and frisk away.
“And an old man told me once,” concluded Mary Christmas, looking at
the rapt faces of the children, “what _he_ heard about the hand
of holy Saint Gregory. He said that flowers and trees which wanted
water in the hot summer would spring up afresh when the silver box was
brought among them. So that wherever the pilgrim went, the valleys and
hills blossomed and there was peace everywhere--just as on Ascension
eve.”
“What’s Ascension eve, Mary Christmas?”
Mary Christmas looked at them in perplexed surprise, and then at the
church spire, just visible through the blossoming trees. Evidently she
was doubtful as to the sufficiency of New England Congregationalism in
the nineties.
“It is the eve of the day when our Lord ascended into Heaven,” she
said slowly. “On that night, in my country, at one moment which no one
knows, all the water everywhere is still. Rivers and streams do not
move. In that moment stones and flowers and stars and all creatures
speak to one another. If you should hide in a cave in the mountain and
hear them, you would never feel sadness any more.”
The tense softness of her voice as she said those last words mingled
with the hum of bees in the quiet orchard. The children were silent
as they looked at her, even the boys vaguely conscious that this was
no time to speak. She leaned back against the gray trunk of the apple
tree, her body relaxed, her quick hands listless in her lap, her mouth
still and thoughtful. Only her eyes under their dark brows were not
still. They were as though haunted by living flames that soared upward
from the fire in her heart. Mary Wescott saw them burning there, and
understood all at once that Beauty had kindled them--the irresistible,
torturing loveliness that lies in ancient, lip-worn tales, consecrated
forever by their own mystic grace and by the simple faith of a people’s
childhood.
In mid-afternoon, when their mother called Mary Christmas to a lunch
of sandwiches and milk before she should again take to the road with
her great pack, the children followed her to the house, fairly dazed
by all the unfamiliar things which they had heard. When she had gone,
they would sort out all these bewildering events and persons and places
and put them in orderly, well-kept mental niches, to be taken out and
reviewed one at a time: the Garden of Eden with its Tree of Life; the
ark and its one transcendent plank; Saints Jacob and Gregory; the
penitent pilgrim with his silver box; Armenian hills and valleys in
the single magic moment of Ascension eve. But now, overpowered by the
wealth to which they had become the heirs, they could only stand and
watch her as she ate her lunch and talked with their father and mother
about the roads she would travel during the next few days and her
prospects for the summer.
When, intent upon reaching a near-by town before the late June twilight
should fade, she had gone upon her way in the lengthening afternoon
shadows, and the children retold her stories to their father and
mother, Mary Wescott, impelled by the desire to be alone, left them on
the porch and hurried through the pasture to the boulder. Once she
had climbed to the top and looked again at the crab-apple tree, now
white with drifting bloom, the lump in her throat got the better of her
and her eyes filled with tears. But no one can be quite sure that the
crab-apple tree was the cause. It might have been the sad, haunting
beauty of certain words of Mary Christmas, or the thought of one star
calling to another across a wide Eastern sky.
* * * * *
The next day it rained. An east wind swept the last petals from the
orchard trees, and drove them through the misty air into the drenching
grass. Cynthia, returning in the rain from an errand for her mother,
brought in one which clung close to her wet, pink cheek. Watching the
storm from the library windows, they talked of Mary Christmas. What was
she thinking of as she followed the coast road beneath the lowering
rain-filled clouds? Was it of Saint Gregory, or the great, dim church
where she had been healed, or of Raphael and little Mary in Erzerum?
There was one place which they knew where the highroad ran just
above the ocean, where on clear days one could see the Mount Desert
hills lying like a sleeping giant against the blue horizon. Here, on
days like this, the surf, driven by the wind, pounded at the foot of
fog-wrapped cliffs; here, they felt sure, she would wish for Ascension
eve when for one moment the waters are still.
VI
A GOOD SAINT AND A SILVER BOX
In late September, when a blue haze veiled the hills beyond the
harbor and so lay over the upland farms that one who did not know
might easily think the land was kind, when woodbine flamed upon the
stone walls and the still air sang with a hidden insect-chorus, Mary
Christmas surprised and delighted them all by coming again. Her visit
this time was brief,--she was on the trail of a rumor that some
late summer-sojourners wanted laces,--but she stayed long enough to
strengthen their faith in the stories of the miraculous relics at
Etchmiadzin, and to convince them anew that she had become, in truth,
the most wonderful person in all their world. Nor were they obliged
to content themselves during that winter merely with conjectures as
to what she was doing and with the tracings of her spring journeyings
upon the map. Their father, returning from Augusta during the
legislative season for a week-end at home, told them of meeting her
one day on the city street, and of his embarrassment when, in the face
of all the passers-by, she threw herself at his feet in the newly
fallen snow quite as she had done on the library floor. She had, he
said,--the country roads being impassable,--begun to ply a winter
trade in handmade and imported articles among the larger towns along
the railroad, and was already becoming, so his city friends told him,
a familiar figure. Once again he saw her, this time in a coach of the
train from Portland to Boston, whence he was traveling, much to the
satisfaction of his family, to deliver a speech on Republican integrity
before the McKinley Club of that city. Here again, prostrating herself
as completely as the train aisle would permit, she hailed him as her
savior, much to the amazement of the pop-corn boy, the conductor, and
all the tired, self-centred persons who usually travel on trains.
The tidings bridged the long succession of cold and snow-blocked
weeks which had kept her from them the year before, and brought her
nearer. Moreover, in the games and plays which they had formed from her
stories, her presence among them became almost tangible. Every child
in the village knew those stories, which the Wescotts had retold with
such generosity of detail and with no slight degree of superiority;
and there was not one who would willingly refuse his services when a
well was to be dug for Saint Gregory in the deepest snowdrift, or when
a suitable plank must be procured for presentation to Saint Jacob, who
patiently slumbered at the foot of some improvised Ararat.
Here were pastimes of which they never tired, pageants which the State
of Maine in the late nineteenth or in any other century could not
afford them. Here, as they ransacked their various attics for costumes,
trained the dogs of the neighborhood to take the part of wild boars,
instructed Saint Gregory in the art of crossing himself, and converted
the Wescott stable into the Etchmiadzin church, they felt the lure of
“stronds afar remote,” recognized, even if vaguely, the charm that
forever lies in unfamiliar, echoing names of distant places, and dimly
perceived a spiritual magic and romance that transcended religion as
they knew it, as sunlight transforms a dull and barren room.
There was, it must be admitted, not a little honest doubt on the part
of parents, both as to the advisability of these plays and games and as
to the character and influence of this stranger within their gates who
had inspired them. Were stories that dealt with saints and relics and
a church with an altar suitable to the needs of a strictly Protestant
community? Was there not sacrilege, or worse still, mockery, in this
sign of the cross which every child who had at any time played the part
of Saint Gregory could make with avidity? Was it not possible that
such practices, even in play, might tend to entice children from that
straight, narrow, and rather unembellished way which their fathers had
so steadfastly and unquestioningly trod?
These queries, however, if not answered satisfactorily, were at least
stilled by a kind of mutual confidence and dependence common to New
England village life in the nineties--a dependence which afforded
inestimable advantages both to the individual and to society. Pleading
children of this period most commonly received from their parents one
of the following replies:--
“If the Wescott children do, you may.”
“If Mrs. Howe lets Lucy and William, I’ll let you.”
“Wait and see if the Parker children go.”
That the stories and games told and inspired by Mary Christmas were
not considered harmful by the Wescott parents was sufficient reason
for their toleration, if not for their sanction, by other heads of
families. As for Mary Christmas herself, the initial suspicion which
her sudden and outlandish appearance had bred among them had died an
early death. The reception and confidence accorded her by the Wescotts,
her tragic story, which appealed especially to those fired by foreign
missionary zeal, and above all the good reports of her conduct on the
road, of her honesty, industry, and kindness to children, which were
circulated freely by those having relatives in the more open country,
all bore witness to her worthiness as an occasional companion.
So the children played on undisturbed. While the snow covered the
fields, they enacted Saint Jacob, his toiling, unsuccessful ascent of
Ararat, and the visit from the plank-bearing angel; and in the first
thaw they used the moist, easily packed snow for the construction
of Saint Gregory’s well, the home of the kind widow, and a rather
diminutive palace of the wicked king. In the summer, reënforced by
all the children within a wide radius, they ran screaming through the
open fields, now as hordes of barbarians, devastating the land of
Mary Christmas, now as bloodthirsty Turks, bent on massacre. But the
acknowledged favorite was the story of the journey of Mary Christmas,
sick, in the donkey-cart to Etchmiadzin and of her healing in the
great church. This they played again and again with William Howe’s big
Newfoundland as the donkey, Cynthia and Mary alternately as the sick
child and her anxious mother, Roger as the priest in the church, and
William himself, on account of his necessary provision for the journey,
as the joyous father. When John looked wistful at having no part, they
made him the little brother, who with the mother welcomed his sister’s
glad return home, under the old tamarack tree at the bottom of the
field.
Curiously enough, perhaps, they did not play the penitent pilgrim,
though it would seem that his triumphant journey with Saint Gregory’s
hand beneath his cloak might have afforded the best sort of dramatic
material. Whether it lacked for them a certain concrete vividness
which the other stories held, or whether, actuated by some strange,
instinctive reserve, not unknown to childhood, they forbore to portray
in visible form the many miraculous deeds wrought by the hand of the
saint, one will never know; but the older members of the company never
proposed its performance, and its stirring details were kept alive
among them only by oral tradition.
And yet, although the players, as a whole, never presented the
journeyings of the good bishop, the story was enacted by one of their
number, who, going alone after the manner of the pilgrim himself,
wrought his holy deeds in the silence of the snow-covered woods and
pastures. That one was Cynthia Wescott. Since Mary Christmas had
first told her stories, she had held this one as the tale of tales;
and as the months in their quick succession left her longer and more
awkward in arms and legs and more wondering and wistful in heart, its
loveliness haunted her until it hurt by its very grace and beauty.
Cynthia, it will be readily perceived, was growing up. No blossom-laden
tree had flashed suddenly upon her inward vision,--Fate, perhaps,
had been kinder to her sister,--but certain disturbing questions and
indistinct, reluctant perceptions had gleamed for a moment across
her ready imagination, and then had faded away before she could see
them clearly. They were the growing pains of her mind, though she
did not know that. One day she felt the weight of coming years; the
next the ecstasy of their hidden secrets. Into her life, she would
have said could she have found words to describe it, there had crept
a kind of rhythm, now quick and joyous with melody, now slow and sad
in its cadences. It was all quite unexplainable, and at times most
bewildering. And when on Christmas eve at the concert in the church
she discovered all at once that John, reciting a piece, in a velvet
suit, skillfully fashioned from the discarded parlor lambrequin, was
something to cry over instead of to smile at as the others were doing,
as _she_ had always done before, she understood that the clear,
orderly days of her little girlhood had gone away. Nor could she then
know that they would return to her after many years, clear, orderly,
luminous, their certain rhythms in harmonious accord.
Thus it happened that on a clear February morning, while the others
were coasting down the long hill, Cynthia played the part of the
pilgrim. Clad in red hood and mittens and in her red coat with its long
cape, which so effectually hid the necessary box with its supernatural
powers, she hurried to the stable and through its big, yawning doors
into the snow-covered fields which led almost directly to the woods
and high pastures. The crust of the snow was hard enough to bear her
weight, and she hurried on until she was beyond the reach of the eyes
and ears of those in the immediate neighborhood. Once within the shadow
of the trees, she stood beneath a great pine, almost shamefaced over
her yielding to the desire to come on such an errand. But the stillness
of the woods, broken only by the occasional cry of a bluejay or the
swish of pine boughs in the wind, reassured her in her purpose, and she
began the journey of the pilgrim with his silver box.
As she grew older, she always held among the confused and crowded
impressions of her childhood the clearest memory of that winter day;
of the bright silence of the woods, and of herself going softly
through the trees, across a frozen swamp with the brown marsh grass
protruding above its smooth, white hummocks, over wide stretches of
pasture, and stopping here and there to draw from beneath her red cape
the wonder-working box and to present it before the suffering eyes of
some stricken animal or tired wayfarer. She heard, too, as the years
came and went, the sound of her own childish voice, clear and high in
the still air, reciting the words with which Mary Christmas’ mellowed,
ringing tones had endowed the pilgrim and which she supplemented by
others of her own:--
“‘Art thou ill, my brother? Look upon the hand of the holy Saint
Gregory, which the Lord hath sent unto thee.’”
“‘Death, flee away from this poor creature, in the blessed name of
Saint Gregory and of the Lord of Hosts!’”
It was from that day, she knew, that the love of words came to suffuse
her life with its radiance, tuning her ears to cadences of sound,
charming her eyes with the ecstasy of light and color, delighting her
imagination by opening gates into far fields. Had the lips of countless
thousands in their age-long life endowed them with music? Had the
visions, evoked by them centuries ago, lingered within their syllables?
From that day as the penitent pilgrim in the still, white wood she
became a worshipper at their shrine, repeating to herself again and
again the sentences and phrases which Mary Christmas had first endeared
to her and which had stayed to take up their own places in her heart:--
“‘The Lord be merciful unto thee.’”
“‘In the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of
Hosts.’”
Single words, too, began to hold a charm for her, words
quite free from their context, but never alone because of the pictures
they called forth. _Silent, holy, high, garden, old_--what magic
lay within each one of them!
_Old_ was, perhaps, her first love and kept its place in spite
of many contending rivals. Mary Christmas loved _old_. Upon her
lips it opened the gates of ancient cities, led one over desolate,
hoary plains and hot, sand-swept deserts, carried one to remote gardens
within gray, crumbling walls, brought before one’s eyes a time-worn,
weary land. Cynthia came to cherish those three letters as one
cherishes a rare jewel which in changing lights gives forth changing
colors. In fact, she grew so ardent in her love for them that she felt
personally aggrieved when John at the breakfast table, his father being
absent, cried in a sudden declaration of independence:--
“I hate this nasty old porridge! I won’t eat it!”
VII
A PILLAR OF FIRE
The opening years of the new century found Mary and Cynthia within the
white-columned academy and in daily verbal conflict with Orgetorix,
chief of the Helvetians, Catiline, and the Ten Thousand Greeks
with their interminable parasangs; Roger mightily concerned with
“Thanatopsis” and cube root; and John under the initial spell of the
burial of De Soto in the dark Mississippi. They found Mrs. Wescott
still true to sulphur and molasses, blue serge, and a nine o’clock
bedtime, and Mr. Wescott still a victim during the summer months of
that distressing habit already fully described, and an all-the-year
supporter of the party which had brought forth a Lincoln and inspired
a McKinley--the party whose bedrock principles of conservatism and
integrity must safely weather its present rather drastic and impulsive
leadership. And they found Mary Christmas still a traveler of the coast
roads from the drifting of apple blossoms in early June to the falling
of the leaves in late October.
Nor had those years wrought many changes in Mary Christmas. Except for
some white threads in her dark hair and the deepening of certain lines
about her nose and mouth, she was outwardly as she had been on that
memorable first visit. She still wore the gold coins in her ears and
the red silk handkerchief, shifted her black bundle from one hip to the
other with surprising agility, and persisted in falling upon her face
at the initial approach of Mr. Wescott. She was still an inexhaustible
treasure-house of stories, each year adding others to those first and
best beloved, of the ark and Ararat, of the ancient saints and the
pilgrim, and of that holy city, Etchmiadzin. Her eyes under their dark
brows had not lost their restlessness. Now they burned with anguish
over the sufferings of her land, now glowed with the sad loveliness of
the tales which she told, now gleamed with ominous revenge at the hated
name of Turk, which, although the children were forbidden to use it in
her presence, occasionally found its way to her ears. Falling petals
and the drying of the country roads still were heralds of her coming;
indeed, those early days in June when orchard blossoms drifted through
the bright air had come to be known in the Wescott family and among the
other children of the village as Mary Christmas days.
And yet the opening years of that new century found Mary Christmas
in ways of pleasantness which the late nineties had been reluctant
to promise her. Indeed, she might well have cried with the Psalmist,
perchance of her own hill pastures: “The lines are fallen unto me in
pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.” Slowly but steadily
she had built up a reputation for herself among a people by nature
skeptical of the “foreigner,” and in districts far from Utopian for
peddlers of all sorts. Although she had in no small measure the
shrewdness of her race, all suspicion of dishonesty, rife upon her
early appearance, had been dispelled by an openness in her business
dealings, almost childlike in its simplicity. Attendant upon this was
a ready understanding of the whims and prejudices of her customers, a
happy faculty which forbade the tenacity of the average seller, but was
quick to suggest a substitute for whatever was refused. Aiding these
assets to good business and yet transcending them all was her larger,
more bountiful self, which, once met with on the common way, was never
to be forgotten, and which now, as then, beggars all attempts at
description.
She manifested, even to dull people, an almost overwhelming prodigality
of nature. Her energy was tireless and apparently incapable of
consumption. It carried her over miles of country, sometimes in a
drenching rain, and left her at nightfall at the back door of some
upland farm, whose unwilling inhabitants grudgingly offered her the
hayloft as a bedchamber and in an hour were taking down the newspapers
from the windows of the spare room. It lent a buoyancy to her tired
feet when during her first months as a traveler she had left the main
road for an outlying house, only to be turned away at the gate. It
prompted her in long stretches of woodland to sing the folk songs of
her people--songs of Vartan, who saved Armenia from the worship of
fire, and of the Virgin, on whose festival the ripening grapes are
blessed by a holy cross. It made her never too tired to talk or to play
with children. In its gracious strength she dreamed dreams and saw
visions: dreams of the day when she should bring her children to this
kind, new land; visions of herself, behind a red pushcart with stout,
well-oiled wheels, convenient apartments for small accessories, and a
thick rubber cover, protective against bad weather. Who shall say that
it sprang from a superabundance of physical well-being alone? Surely
such power breathed of the spiritual, and suggested the generosity of
God on the day of her creation.
Thus it happened that after five summers in the country and five
winters in the towns the dream of dreams came true, and Raphael
Christmas and his sister Mary arrived from Erzerum. What excitement
there was in the Wescott family and in the Wescott village, when on
a Mary Christmas day, just five years from the first, this great
announcement was proudly made under the apple trees! Even Mary and
Cynthia, with their braids turned under and college only two years
away, were thrilled to their finger-tips, and John and Roger refused
to let Mary Christmas go on her way until she had promised to bring
Raphael with her the following spring.
But Raphael Christmas, it must be confessed, was a sore disappointment.
When, the news of his mother’s approach having been brought to them by
the doctor in his carriage, they ran to meet her up the hill, and saw
a tall, awkward boy in clothes like their own, they were all conscious
of a sinking feeling within themselves. No imagination, even of the
most leaping and vivid variety, could see in this overgrown lad, who
shifted uneasily from one side of the road to the other, threw stones
at sparrows, and was impolite to his mother, one who had lived in the
Garden of Eden and had looked upon Mount Ararat with its light-touched
shadow of the ark. Not the most friendly feeling in the world could
transform his dark, thin face, with its shrewd black eyes and its
total lack of all those qualities which made his mother’s beautiful,
into the welcome one of a valued, if infrequent, companion.
Swift Americanization, a process at that time relatively unhampered by
theories, had left its marks on Raphael Christmas. A year at school
in Portland had taught him many things. Among the most outstanding
of these were an astounding command of American slang of a range and
versatility known to few natives, the art of chewing gum noisily and
continuously, and the most rampant desire to lose as soon as possible
all traces of his foreign birth. This longing prompted him to an
almost continual nagging of his mother. Her red silk handkerchief, the
gold coins in her ears, and her gold-laced bodice annoyed him. His
playfellows in Portland laughed at them and taunted him. Whenever his
quick eyes saw money pass into her hands from the sale of anything, he
began his questions.
“There’s money, Ma! For a dress, ain’t it--a real dress, and a hat?
Yes?”
“There’s money! You buy a hat now, and take out the coins?”
He had grown quickly to dislike all references to Armenia, and only
tolerated his mother’s fervent hopes that he might some day avenge his
father’s death, because he liked the picture of himself, knife-armed,
and giving blood for blood.
All these things the Wescotts gathered for themselves on that sixth
Mary Christmas day--gathered with a ready sympathy for Mary Christmas
that helped to quell their own disillusionment. Mary and Cynthia,
escaping to their own room after dinner while their father and mother
talked with their guest and while John and Roger introduced Raphael
more or less apologetically to the baseball team, confided to each
other their only remaining hope, that Mary Christmas could not, for the
blinding glory of her dreams, see in Raphael what they saw. What might
happen, they wondered, if she did see in one quick, all-illuminating
flash or in a hundred more slow, more cruel perceptions the
unloveliness in him, so apparent to them all! Then the light that
went before her like a pillar of fire, that made her forgetful of
tired feet, that impelled her to sing songs and to tell stories to
children--might it not vanish into unutterable darkness?
But Fate was kind to Mary Christmas and reassuring to Mary and Cynthia.
Surely no all-illuminating flash revealed Raphael to his mother,
and, if the perceptions came, they were slow and far less cruel than
they might have been. To her, Raphael, in spite of his derision of
their country, his shiftiness, his nagging, and his gum, was heir to
the wealth of ages and, in some mysterious way which would later be
revealed to them, the certain avenger of his father’s cruel death. She
did concede, it is true, to his nagging, and, to the Wescott mind, in a
deplorable measure; for in the spring following his visit she appeared
in a rusty green suit, many sizes too large for her, and in a red,
daisy-trimmed hat, which she wore so insecurely pinned to her dark hair
that it sat upon one ear in a most rakish manner. But the gold coins
she never relinquished.
That year, too, the vision of the pushcart became a reality. It was
red, with the stout, well-oiled wheels of which she had dreamed; it
boasted the protective rubber covering, which on fair days folded
neatly under its shining body; it had compartments of all sizes with
hinged covers, and, for those which carried the most valuable of her
wares, padlocks with tiny keys. Her pride in it and her repeated
assurances that the labor of her journey was now depleted by half
atoned in some degree for the loss of the gold-laced bodice and for the
advent of the red hat.
It was on this visit that they noted the deepening lines around her
nose and mouth, and a perceptible, if slight, dulling of her eyes that
had so burned and glowed through all the years they had known her.
“You’re tired, Mary Christmas,” said Father Wescott. “Stay at home this
winter and let the town trade go.”
And John, drawing his mother into the pantry on the pretext of an
afternoon lunch, confessed, in a burst of anxious confidence, that he,
for one, was worried.
But Mary Christmas laughed at them as she adjusted her new hat, which
immediately became unadjusted when she stooped to lift the handle of
the pushcart. She must work winter and summer, she said; it cost a
lot to keep a family of three in a real house. There was pride in her
voice, however, when she told John, who pushed the cart up the hill for
her, how Raphael was now standing on the street corners and selling
papers in shrill calls like a real American boy, and how deftly and
quickly the fingers of little Mary went in and out of the frames that
held the laces.
VIII
SHOWERS OF GOLD AND PEARLS
Thus it came about in Wescott history that those bright years of
childhood when things were things and those troubled later years when
the same things could not be bounded by their own neat selves became a
kind of tapestry shot through and through with colored threads. Blue,
purple, red, gold, and silver, they deepened and glowed--the colors
of music and poetry, of magical words and ancient tales, of romance
and high endeavor, of distant places and strange peoples, of sacrifice
and holiness. Into the texture of their lives Mary Christmas had woven
those threads in hues that were fadeless against time and circumstance.
Not that the four Wescotts interpreted their love for Mary Christmas
or their debt to her in terms of colored threads in tapestry. That was
to come later. They only knew that for years she had added to their
lives a vividness and a completeness which had not been there before
she came. They knew, too, that she had entwined herself inextricably
within the fabric of their existence because of her connection with
certain occurrences, which, it is quite safe to say, seemed at the time
of their happening of more tremendous import than all the quiet hours
beneath the orchard trees.
They early learned that she was a safe repository for secrets and a
valued counselor in times of storm and stress; and although her visits
were confined to that anticipated one of early June and an occasional
second in October, which they could never entirely depend upon, they
found her more than once the one thing needful. Indeed, Roger and
John, with other of their associates, never forgot her sudden and
unlooked-for appearance and the quick relief it engendered on a certain
Saturday morning of September in Roger’s thirteenth year. They were
gathered in disheartened council on Mary Wescott’s boulder, in a final
and desperate effort to discover some means of averting from themselves
the just deserts of a forbidden line of conduct, which, in this case,
had to do with some pear trees, an angry farmer, stones, and broken
windows. Retribution seemed inevitable. They were silently picturing
the chastened glances which they would exchange at church the next
morning in an attempt to discover whose fate had been most unendurable,
when around a bend in the path at the foot of the boulder came Mary
Christmas, taking her favorite short cut through the pasture. Surely
here was visible proof of a beneficent Providence, who was not deaf to
frenzied prayers, and who caused His rain to fall alike upon the just
and upon the unjust!
It was no easy matter to disclose all the miserable details of the
affair to Mary Christmas, whose piercing black eyes sought out every
jot and tittle of the truth; but hope, so long deferred, spurred
them on, and they spared themselves nothing, secure at least in the
knowledge that a general confession to her was, when compared with
acknowledgment made alone and unaided before grieved and disillusioned
parents, of two evils most certainly the lesser. They needed five
dollars, they told her, after their consciences were, for the time
being, freed--just five hundred times the amount which Roger had
unearthed from his pockets, and which was the sole wealth among them.
They named the sum with hesitation; it was appallingly large in those
days; but it was the necessary aggregate which must be extorted from
them by sundown if their parents were to remain in ignorance.
“I see,” said Mary Christmas, once the miserable tale was told, her
stern, sharp eyes scrutinizing each guilty face. “I see.” Surely the
first person singular, present indicative of that simple verb had never
before been burdened with such weighty disapproval!
Then she produced the five dollars, which was wrapped with other bills,
quite bewildering to the boys, in folds of white cloth and hidden deep
within her gold-laced bodice; but she did not give it to them until she
had exacted from each a twofold promise of upright living in the future
and of reimbursement from their own earnings in the spring. Sitting
at the foot of the boulder in the middle of their circle, she made a
swift reckoning of the amount due her from each boy, which amounts
she wrote on slips of paper, a separate slip for the pocket of each
blouse. Only to John she gave none, considering him more sinned against
than sinning, and warning them all against leading those younger than
themselves into wrongdoing. Him she kept with her, reluctant as he was
for once to stay, while she sent the others, in whose breasts relief
was fast conquering repentance, on a two-mile journey through the woods
to apologize to the farmer and to pay their just indebtedness.
Be it said to her credit that she collected the five dollars, even to
the uttermost farthing. It was returned to her the following spring,
as she had demanded, by boys who approached her singly from every
conceivable hiding-place along the road and proffered hard-earned
coins in bits of dirty paper. Be it said, too, that two months after
the incident by the boulder, her own conscience troubling her by the
thought that she might have wronged him who had been for so long her
friend, she wrote a full account of it to Mr. Wescott, confessing
freely her part as protector, but asking that, if possible, the
children be not punished. Mr. Wescott smiled over Mary Christmas’
letter, which he shared with Mrs. Wescott in the seclusion of the
library. It lacked the ease and growing accuracy of her speech,
and was, in parts, with its self-abasement and anxious queries,
inexpressibly funny. Then, because he was conservative in parenthood as
well as in politics, he said not a word to John and Roger, though he
did contrive that winter to put in the way of his older son more than
the usual opportunities for earning an honest penny.
There were other affairs of far less serious nature in which Mary
Christmas played the part of a confidante and friend, not to the
Wescotts alone but to many other children in their village and in
other villages along the coast of Maine. So many in fact were there
that these pages cannot attempt to chronicle them; but one other they
must relate because of its immediate importance to at least one of the
Wescotts, and its later tremendous significance to the family at large.
That year in the life of Mary Christmas which so stupendously marked
the advent of the pushcart and the red hat marked in the lives of Mary
and Cynthia Wescott their graduation from the academy. Orgetorix, chief
of the Helvetians, and the wholly infamous Catiline had given place
to Æneas, his aged father Anchises, and his little son Ascanius, and
Cyrus the Younger with his ten thousand Greeks had marched both up and
down, moving on at last to make way for Achilles, sulking in his tent.
Reciting their carefully prepared essays in the church to the village
at large, the one on “Clara Barton, Her Life and Work,” the other a
clarion call to achievement, entitled “_Trans Alpes Italia Est_,”
they were not in the least unaware that their white graduation frocks
eclipsed all the others by reason of the yards of lace which embraced
their shoulders in a kind of bertha, and which from waist to hem
encircled their wide skirts. Mary Christmas, with the help of little
Mary, had woven that lace through the long winter evenings in Portland,
and had sent it as a forerunner of her own arrival. When she came,
pushing the red cart down the hill, and again drawing the anxious
attention of the Wescotts by the deepening lines in her face, the
graduation was a thing of the past, and the hearts of Mary and Cynthia
were beating excitedly at the thought of college in the fall.
But it was not only the thought of college which was quickening the
heart of Mary Wescott in those early days of her nineteenth year;
and this Mary Christmas discovered on the late afternoon of the day
when she said good-bye to John and set forth along the familiar road.
Reaching the bars which heretofore had given her access to the short
cut through the pasture, she stopped, realizing for the second time
that day that a pushcart has its disadvantages. But desiring a drink
from the spring that bubbled up at the foot of the boulder, and a
glimpse of the freshness of the woods before she must again take to the
dusty highway, she drew the red cart to the side of the road, carefully
lifted her new skirt to escape the roughness of the gray fence-poles,
and crawled between the bars. A few steps through the alders and over
the moist green hummocks, starred here and there with the blue of
violets, and she emerged into the path that led to the boulder and the
spring.
She did not drink from the spring, however, thirsty though she was, nor
was she conscious of the freshness of the woods with their sun-flecked
shadows; for there on the boulder above her, and facing the vista that
afforded a sight of the crab-apple tree, sat Mary Wescott with her
bright head resting against the dark shoulder of William Howe--the
selfsame William who had once played the part of Mary’s father in the
Etchmiadzin miracle, and who had but just returned triumphant after a
year with the Alma Mater of Mr. Longfellow and Father Wescott.
Mary Christmas leaned against the great rock in sheer surprise. The
realization that Mary Wescott was a little girl no longer was in itself
a shock; and this outward and visible sign that a new door in life
had suddenly swung wide for her was quite too overwhelming. Entirely
unprepared for both, Mary Christmas stood still and vaguely discerned
as through a mist what the two on the rock saw with such intensity--the
white tree with its full-blown, drifting blossoms. She did not hear
their whispered confidences, did not know that Mary Wescott was finding
it the easiest and most satisfying thing in the world to tell William
how the crab-apple tree had made her feel and to receive from him
the perfect assurance that he had felt exactly the same way! She was
concerned solely, once she had come to herself, with the question of
whether she could reach the shelter of the alders without attracting
their notice. Then William bent his head toward Mary, for he was all at
once seized with the most absurd idea that there were secrets in the
corners of her mouth; but in that instant, instead of assuring himself
that he was right, he caught sight of Mary Christmas’ red hat. For that
hat had been designed to arrest, even at such a moment as this, the
most wandering attention.
It is, perhaps, just as well not to describe all that followed--the
confusion, the embarrassment, the confession, the explanations, the
pleas for secrecy. It is quite enough to say that William, standing
with his arm around Mary in the shadow of the great boulder, led the
conversation, as was entirely fitting and proper, and that Mary
Christmas, in spite of earlier misgivings, the result no doubt of
surprise, felt her heart warm toward him as he professed his intentions
the most honorable in the world and maintained his decision to
interview Father Wescott as a gentleman should, just as soon as another
year of college should have added dignity and certainty to their dream.
Mary Wescott, on her part, cried a little, as I believe girls did on
similar occasions a quarter of a century ago, absurd as it doubtless
was; and then as the lengthening shadows foretold the evening light,
Mary Christmas gave her promise and her blessing. They all went back
to the pushcart together, where Mary Wescott straightened the red hat
and perked up the daisies. It was all in vain, however; for when Mary
Christmas again started on her way, the hat lurched in such reckless
abandon that Mary and William both wished the daisies had been allowed
to retain their former modest expression.
That evening, as she journeyed along the cool, fragrant roads, Mary
Christmas sang, not now the songs of Vartan or of the Virgin’s
festival, but one of wedded love. How clearly the unfamiliar, musical
words rose and fell in the still air, accompanied by the monotonous
undertone of the pushcart:--
“It rained showers of gold when Artasches became a bridegroom;
It rained pearls when Satenik became a bride.”
IX
FOLKLORE AND POLITICS
That fall Mary and Cynthia went to college. The preparation for this
event of events had been almost more overwhelming than the journey
itself and those first over-crowded, uncomfortable days away from
home. In extent and quality their new wardrobes were in themselves
unbelievable. A half dozen times a day they experienced entirely
unaccustomed thrills as they raised the lids of their new trunks and
gazed upon outfits in which blue gingham and serge did not predominate.
Their graduation frocks with Mary Christmas’ lace were, of course,
their best dresses, to be reserved for the gayest of parties; but
there was a sprigged muslin apiece for second best and--wonder of
wonders!--silk gowns in brown and dark red for Sundays, with wide
shoulder-collars of heavy white embroidery. Blue serge, indeed, was
absent, except for their sailor suits for everyday and for the most
startling innovation of all, their gymnasium suits.
Now those gymnasium suits had caused more problematical musing than
all the other effects of the wardrobes combined. The college catalogue
had announced them as necessities, and some forceful woman in a high
position had sent explicit directions for their manufacture. And yet
Father Wescott, when Cynthia and Mary turned around slowly before him,
was frankly puzzled, and would, I fear, have been remonstrant had not
the realization of his faith in legitimate authority prevented him. As
for Mrs. Wescott, it is not too much to say that her sense of rectitude
had been outraged. Indeed, upon the first trying on, she remarked
with no lack of decision that she almost preferred her daughters to
remain uneducated than to appear in such clothing. She became somewhat
reconciled, however, when she discovered that if Cynthia and Mary
remained perfectly stationary the bloomers might easily be mistaken
for short and full skirts; and the girls were wise enough not to raise
the objection that in all probability they could not stand still
indefinitely in a gymnasium. Mrs. Wescott worried also over the local
seamstress; for in spite of the tax imposed upon her ingenuity by the
modeling of these extraordinary garments, she had taken occasion to
express her opinion of them in no uncertain terms, and Mrs. Wescott did
not feel that she could so impair her own dignity as to make a plea for
secrecy.
But the passage of time had somewhat minimized even these forebodings,
and the great day had come and gone, leaving Mrs. Wescott with ample
time to study at close range the psychology of boyhood in the early
teens, and plunging Mary and Cynthia into a sea of new events and
places, new personalities and studies, which, after the first few days,
allowed no room for homesickness.
They were, although they did not know it, particularly fortunate in
the college life of their age. It was, in a sense, more peculiarly
receptive than in these latter days. Like the hungry multitude waiting
for the loaves and fishes, students “sat down” in order that they might
be fed, and were miraculously supplied. In still another scriptural
phrase, they “asked”; therefore, they received. And all this largely
because the individual had not yet discovered himself through the aid
of intelligence tests, vocational guidance, and other encouragements
toward self-analysis. If Mary and Cynthia Wescott possessed complexes
of various sorts, they were not made aware of the fact; and if they
were temperamentally unsuited to quadratic equations, no one incited
them to act upon this convenient truth. They and their associates
without doubt missed much, but they escaped at least the minute
dissection of their own natures, and were thus able in later years to
be genially surprised upon the occasional discovery of themselves.
Vocational guidance they entirely escaped. No expert, after an
interview of ten exhaustive minutes, told them for what they were best
fitted. In those days young men and women did what seemed at the time
the nearest and best thing to do. Mary and Cynthia, it is true, were
more fortunate than most in this respect. Having known Mary Christmas,
they needed no vocational adviser. Mary Wescott knew before she had
been two years at college that the thing she was most interested in
(that is, next to William Howe) was the study of races of people, their
history, their customs, their possibilities in the light of American
citizenship, and that, if she could only forget William, she wanted to
work with such people in some great city. As for Cynthia, she had been
sure, ever since the day when she played the penitent pilgrim in the
snow, that she wanted to study great literature and some day to unlock
for others the door to the majesty of its presence. She had another
dream, too. Even more than she wanted to show to others the beauty and
magic of words, she longed to write them herself--words that should
make one feel the calm arrogance of bright noons on high, treeless
plains, words that should suggest the intimacy of those same plains,
silver-mantled, at midnight. And when she dreamed this dream a blue
light, the color of harebells in sunshine, crept into her clear gray
eyes and lingered there.
So it was that Mary Christmas went to college with Mary and Cynthia
Wescott, the presence of her spirit enlightening and coloring their
hopes and plans for the future. Once, indeed, she came herself, in
gold-laced bodice and red silk handkerchief; for so many of Cynthia’s
themes had to do with Armenia, its plains, its saints, its legends,
and with Mary Christmas herself, that her teacher, whose one passion
in life was folklore, inquired about Mary Christmas and suggested that
she be invited to come and sing her songs before a society with a long
and learned name. Thereupon, the invitation was sent to Portland and
received with much bewildered pride; and Mary Christmas, following
Cynthia’s directions to the letter, left her pushcart, her green suit,
and her red hat, and journeyed to the college, where she was met by
Mary and Cynthia and conducted before the learned society. There, her
cheeks flushed and her dark eyes haunted by the same flames which
had burned and glowed on that day so long ago beneath the orchard
trees, she sang her songs, the songs of Vartan, of the Virgin and her
festival, and of Artasches and Satenik, upon whom the gracious heavens
showered gold and pearls. She told her stories, too--the old, familiar
tales of her childhood and of theirs. Mary and Cynthia, sitting with
their friends in the front of the room, were conscious of thousands
of memories thronging back upon them. It was then, perhaps for the
first time, that they realized fully the part that Mary Christmas had
played in their lives; but, conscious of the scholastic atmosphere
into which they had been suddenly thrust, they strove, in spite of the
tears behind their eyes, to appear extremely academic. Meanwhile, the
excited professor took notes furiously, and in due time published his
“findings” in an article which left out Mary Christmas entirely, and
which, since it was printed in the dullest of periodicals, was read
only by himself and by other college professors.
In point of fact, Mary Christmas came once more to college, although
this second visit was not generally known. She came one evening in the
spring of Mary’s and Cynthia’s last year, and she brought Mary Wescott
with her, much to the relief of Cynthia and of their house-mother, a
tall, gaunt woman who felt her responsibilities. Waiting that afternoon
in the Boston station for a train that would take her home after an
unusual journey to that city for shopping in the larger markets, Mary
Christmas was startled by the familiar face of Mary Wescott, now almost
unfamiliar through anxiety and fear. She was sitting on the edge of one
of the long waiting-seats, her scanty luggage beside her, her large
eyes feverishly watching the unceasing line of people who came and went
through the great doors. There was something about her strained, eager
face, so intent upon the passing hundreds, that made Mary Christmas
check her impulsive steps toward her and sit down at the farther end
of the long seat just behind, from which, by rising occasionally, she
could see without being seen.
Before a few minutes had passed she had become convinced that her
own presence was quite safe from discovery. Mary Wescott had not the
slightest interest in those about her. Her anxious gaze never for one
moment left the great entrance doors. She was obviously waiting for
someone, and, as Mary Christmas studied her face, she was convinced
that that someone was no Wescott or chance relative unaccustomed to
city ways.
When Mary Christmas heard the big man at the door call her train in
his trumpet-like voice, she did not seize her big bundle and go. She
waited yet another ten minutes--fifteen--twenty. Then through the
station doors, his big suitcase indiscriminately bumping the shins of
his fellow men, tore William Howe, with all the anxiety which could not
find room on Mary’s face on his own.
Mary Christmas allowed them five hungry minutes for looking at each
other before she left her seat behind them. Perhaps she needed that
time to swallow something big that had crept into her throat. And when
she did approach them, still gazing at each other, the upbraiding words
which she had planned quite left her tongue. For all at once, to her
who had lived over again the sad passing of so many centuries, Mary and
William had become suddenly very young and needy.
Perhaps, as she came with such startling swiftness within their line
of vision, they felt a high, classic rage at this retribution-bearing
Nemesis; but they looked only like two children, fairly and
inextricably caught. Mary Christmas did not say one word as she looked
at them, and William felt it again incumbent upon him to manage
the conversation, the motif of which, he quickly decided, must be
determination at any cost.
“There isn’t a bit of use for you to try to stop us, Mary Christmas,”
he began, looking appealingly at Mary, who had suddenly sat down again
beside her luggage. “We’re running away together, and we’re going to be
married. I’ve got the license, and we’re more than twenty-one. Besides,
it’s a necessity. They won’t let us be married this summer--even with
all the prospects I’ve got and more than a thousand in the bank.
They’ve just told Mary so. It’s an outrage to make us wait! Just as
if I couldn’t take care of her! In less than two years I’ll be third
vice-president of the company. It’s as good as settled. So we’ve just
decided to take matters into our own hands. And I tell you again, Mary
Christmas, there isn’t a bit of use for you to interfere.”
Mary Christmas did not interfere. She looked at Mary Wescott, and
knew by a prophetic gift of insight that Mary was trying to reconcile
romance as she had pictured it with this sinking, frightful feeling in
the region of her heart.
“Do you want to run away like this, Mary?” she asked gently.
“Yes,” faltered Mary. “At least--I did--I _do_--because I
think it’s necessary. William needs me. He lives in a terrible
boarding-house--and--”
“That’s not it,” broke in William, “at least it’s not the main
thing. The main thing is, they don’t understand how we feel. They’re
unreasonable, like my father and mother. If I couldn’t support her, it
would be different. But I can. Besides I’ve got reason to think that
Mary’s father doesn’t like me anyway.” He looked now at Mary as though
ties of blood demanded that she receive this accusation.
“It’s William’s politics,” she faltered again. “He’s a Democrat, and
father _is_ unreasonable. At Christmas, when I talked with him,
he said he hoped William would change. But William won’t!” Decision had
crept into her voice. “And I’m glad! I wouldn’t marry a man who would
change his politics--even for my father.”
Mary Christmas was quick to detect a quality which had crept into her
last words.
“Even for your father.” She repeated Mary’s words. “Your father. How
do you suppose he will feel when he hears you would not wait? And your
mother, too?”
“It’s not just a case of waiting,” interrupted William, to the relief
of Mary, who was in no condition to answer Mary Christmas’ questions.
“If we could be sure about a year from now--but we can’t! And it’s
right about my politics. Mr. Wescott has insulted my party.” William
drew himself up proudly. “He has said openly that no intelligent person
could be a Democrat.”
“It’s been awfully hard for William,” said Mary from behind her
handkerchief.
William consulted his watch. “There’s no use standing here talking,
Mary Christmas.” There was finality in his tone. “I’ve got two friends
waiting for us now, and we’re due at the church at five o’clock. You
can tell them that you saw us here if you like. Of course, we’ll
telegraph them just as soon as we’re married. And they needn’t any of
them worry over Mary. I’ll be good to her all my life--even if I am a
Democrat! And I’m not urging her to be married this way. We talked it
all over when I was out at college a week ago.”
“They needn’t blame William!” cried Mary with the last spurt of a dying
spirit. “I planned it _all_--myself!”
For a moment Mary Christmas was in a quandary. Here was the time and
place for the interference that must come; but how should she interpose
it? And then something happened, almost miraculously, which took away
all necessity for it.
“You know you haven’t any right to interfere with us, Mary Christmas,”
cried William. “Not the least in the world!”
Then down upon Mary Wescott’s tired head there came tumbling her house
of romance, as a child’s colored blocks fall which he has put together
with too unsteady hands. Mary Christmas no right to interfere! She,
who through all these years had lent color and light and reality to
their world? _She_, no right?
“Oh, William!” sobbed Mary Wescott. And that was all.
* * * * *
There were among the guests at Mary Wescott’s wedding, which was held
on a Mary Christmas day the year following her graduation from college,
those who wondered not a little critically when at the close of the
ceremony the bride threw her arms around the neck of Mary Christmas
before she had kissed even her own mother and father. There were
those, too, who questioned the taste of the Wescotts in inviting Mary
Christmas, even in a new suit and hat, to stand within the family
circle. But there will always be those, as everyone is aware, and
neither they nor anything else could mar the perfection of that Mary
Christmas day.
It is quite safe to say also that not a few searching glances studied
Father Wescott’s face as he shook hands with his new son-in-law;
but not one was keen enough to perceive that for which all had been
sent--the assurance that, beneath his cordial acceptance of William, he
was sadly reviewing a party’s history from the Spoils System to Free
Silver!
X
WAYSIDE SACRAMENTS
The five years that followed Mary Wescott’s wedding brought many
changes into the lives of the persons who make this story. From the
Wescott parents in partnership they exacted the unpleasant necessity
of becoming accustomed to an empty house, although they did offer
some compensation in the presentation of two grandsons, who, since
they early favored their Grandfather Wescott in features, might very
probably have inherited also his manner of looking at certain important
matters. To Father Wescott himself those years were nothing short of
cataclysmic. The entire West, he told Mrs. Wescott daily, was going
crazy, the middle portion over that unsound principle of coöperation,
and certain far States in their unprecedented stand upon the recall
of judges. As though a party, dedicated from its early infancy to
Progress, could look upon such extremists, at their best, as anything
short of anarchists! The East must stand firm! Father Wescott accepted
this decision as his battle-cry, and, with many misgivings, bought
an automobile, a vehicle which itself demanded in those days no
small amount of coöperation on the part of its owner. By means of
this locomotion Father Wescott could exhort the county at least to
stand firm in its loyalty to the safe and sane gentleman then in the
presidential chair. This he did while Mrs. Wescott sat by his side in
numberless dooryards, a patient listener to conversations which, she
feared, must ultimately prove useful to her also, if someone did not
stop those absurd women in Washington.
To Cynthia the years were kind, for not only did they convince her
that she was doing the thing she loved most, which conviction is in
itself no mean possession, but one of them took her to far places--to
England, where she studied at Oxford and dreamed away long hours under
the great trees at Iffley Church; to Germany, where she walked in the
Harz Mountains and in Nuremberg ate cakes frosted with fairy tales;
and to Paris, where she wandered for days through the Louvre, lived
in the Latin Quarter, and in every other shop bought presents for
her nephews. John and Roger, beneath the elms and in the echoing old
halls of their father’s and Mr. Longfellow’s college, found life not
unfriendly, though Greek was passing away and though a new and strange
variety of poetry had begun to replace in the affection of students the
long cadences of Mr. Algernon Swinburne. Indeed, John, who had taken to
writing verses in private, composed in these new, uncertain measures
some lines descriptive of an ancient church, standing within gray walls
and bathed in more ancient moonlight.
Nor in the life of Mary Christmas had Time been idle, though in outward
semblance she bore few marks of its changes. At fifty, after nearly
twenty years of traveling on foot, heavily laden and the prey of all
weathers, she was singularly little worn. Her hair was still more
black than gray, and her eyes, although at times they harbored an
unfathomable sadness, had not lost their glow. Still she pushed her
red cart up and down the coast roads--roads which now too often echoed
with the snorts and puffs of vehicles akin to Mr. Wescott’s; still she
arranged to reach the Wescott village in early June. Not once, indeed,
did she deviate from that now long-established custom, even when the
assurance of the later arrival of the four Wescotts, vacation-bound,
might have tempted her to postpone her coming. Them she saw in
midsummer or early fall, often making the journey by rail and by stage
particularly for that purpose; but her first visit of every spring
continued to occur, as it had begun, with the drifting of the petals
and the drying of the roads.
Those who understood her best saw in this tenaciousness an almost
pathetic adherence to custom, which, as she grew older, became
not only the dominating motive in her life but also the source of
untold strength and comfort. Shorn and stripped by the very force of
circumstances of those observances which, hallowed by centuries of
reverent usage, had come down to her, she clung to the places and
persons that, upon her first coming to this new land, had been most
closely identified with the old. For, kind as had been this country of
her adoption with its easy peace and plenty, she felt as she grew older
a disquieting sense of its incompleteness and of her own strangeness
within its welcoming gates. Thus it happened that when Raphael, now a
prosperous American business man in a cigar store, bought and furnished
by his mother’s capital, refused to answer her when she spoke to him in
his native language, and when the new Scandinavian husband of little
Mary laughed stupidly at the cakes which, on the days commemorating
ancient festivals, she brought into his bakeshop, she longed for the
drying of the familiar roads along which she had left the thoughts and
memories of so many years.
Those winding coast roads, which led around quiet coves where herons
stood in the clear, still water, past stretches of gray, wind-vexed
sea and over upland pastures fragrant with bayberry, mitigated in some
degree the tragedy in which Mary Christmas as the years went by had
found herself an unwilling actor. It was the old, bitter tragedy of
Age contending with Youth and going down before it--a tragedy older
than that of Lear or of Isaac and his sons, old as life itself, and
enhanced a thousandfold in its cruelty when enacted by immigrant
children who willingly crush beneath their feet all that their parents
have held sacred. Defeated at home, Mary Christmas took to the long
familiar roads, in the courses of which during those first years she
had lived over again so much of her life. Along that particularly
lonely stretch of woodland she had sung of Vartan; under that great
pine which afforded such a sweep of tossing blue water she had imagined
that she was looking upon the Mediterranean, her homesick eyes dim with
tears; in that clump of sumach, red in the September sunshine, she had
fallen asleep and dreamed that avenging blood was flowing in the far
city of Erzerum; in country lanes, in farmhouse kitchens, and beneath
blossoming apple trees she had told to wide-eyed children her tales of
saints and heroes, and of holy places.
These landmarks of the woods and coast villages lent a consistency and
coherence to her life as she grew older, which not even the complete
emancipation of Raphael and little Mary could entirely disturb.
Through her repeated visits to them and her eager reception of those
sacramental elements of which they were the symbols, she kept close
the past with all its beneficence. It was doubtless in an effort
to strengthen this coherence of which she felt such need that, the
year following Mary Wescott’s marriage and that of her own Mary, she
discarded her suit and hat and returned to the gold-laced bodice and
the red silk handkerchief. These she never again relinquished, in spite
of the pressure at home and the fast changing modes of those complacent
years.
She knew the coast of Maine as few natives knew it and was its best
chronicler during those early years of the new century. She watched
the invasion alike of the summer sojourner and the automobile, and
looked upon both with displeasure, although with the advent of the
former there was increased wealth for her. The latter she scorned to
employ except in the worst of weathers, when she would occasionally
allow some friendly passer-by to carry her to her next stopping-place,
the red pushcart bumping along over the stones in the rear; for she
hated its choking, sputtering voice along the quiet roads and its rude
disturbance of her solitude. She watched children who had feared her
upon her first visits grow to maturity and marry; she brought gifts to
their children. And each year in graveyards above the sea she saw new
white stones, stark and ugly in the wind-swept grass. Before these she
would pause not infrequently, to cross herself and to say a prayer for
the spirits of those who had learned to look upon her with kindliness.
XI
SHORT TWILIGHTS AND DRIFTING PETALS
It was just five years after Mary Wescott’s wedding that, following
unprecedented events in Europe, blood did begin to flow in Erzerum, as
in Mary Christmas’ dream beneath the sumachs. But it was not avenging
blood; and in those awestruck days when the world was rudely shaken
from its serenity, the horror of it was lessened in minds already jaded
by atrocities. In the mind of Mary Christmas, however, it eclipsed
all other catastrophes. The compelling hideousness of it drove sleep
from her tired eyes and within them lighted that red gleam which so
many years ago had frightened the Wescotts at their quiet table. She
was tormented day and night by the intensity of the fire within her.
Seeking blindly the comfort that lies in common suffering, she pushed
the papers with their ghastly, burdened words between the elbows of
Raphael as he leaned upon his cigar case and pondered his stock; but
he, after an impatient glance, turned to the quotations on the tobacco
market. Little Mary, it is true, wept with her mother for a few secret
moments, but her eyes never left the door through which her husband
might at any minute come to stare at her and to shrug his big shoulders.
The next two years, driven by a restlessness that dislodged even the
sacredness of custom, Mary Christmas began her country traveling early
and continued it late. The very exercise of walking long miles over bad
roads, muddy in the spring, frozen and rutty in late autumn, loosened
the tension under which she was living. Moreover, in the outlying
villages and farming districts there were those who, in the light of
present events, listened more eagerly to her stories of ancient wrong
and cruel aggression, and gave her not only the sympathy for which
she had craved, but the more welcome support of their own righteous
indignation.
Finally, as the months dragged themselves wearily into years, she found
in Father Wescott an outlet for all her pent-up hostility and for her
growing resentment toward those governmental heads who were willing
to watch and wait while ships were sunk, and disaster, confusion,
and death stalked from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf. He
not only shared the resentment of Mary Christmas; he fed it with his
own indignant protests. If _his_ party were in Washington, he
told her, things would be different! Mary Christmas knew nothing of
parties, but her worshipful gaze, which the years had not dimmed,
told him as plainly as words that in her opinion the country had made
one incomprehensible error in judgment when it had overlooked him as
leader of its destinies. And although Father Wescott’s native modesty
did not allow him for a moment to share her opinion, he did echo the
sputterings of his automobile as he told his town and county what he
thought of the Administration!
But Father Wescott and Mary Christmas waited yet more months before
the country righted itself in their estimation--months during which
Father Wescott forgot that his business was law and Mary Christmas
that hers was trade, during which Roger and John, the one in the Law
School at Cambridge, the other at the foot of the ladder in a Boston
firm, studied reluctantly, all the while conscious that in spite of
themselves they were marking time.
In the early spring of 1917, impelled by the certainty that watchful
waiting was at last at an end and by the bitter, awful knowledge,
which she until now had been unwilling to admit to herself, that no
avenging spirit would ever quicken her son, Mary Christmas escaped to
the country while the frost was still in the roads and before the first
arbutus, blooming in the cold moss of some woodland rock, touched the
misty air with its perfect fragrance. The last three years had left
indelible marks upon her in the thinness of her face and in the lines
now irretrievably set about her mouth, in the haunting depths of her
eyes and the sagging of her shoulders. They had marked her spirit, too,
though that flickered on, choked and smothered, it is true, but wanting
only draught and fuel to flame again.
Both were supplied, miraculously it seemed to her, in mid-April. For
three weeks she had plodded tirelessly on through days of intermittent
mist and rain along the most remote of her routes, her thoughts
inextricably entangled in a web in which relief over the declaration
of war struggled with bitterness over the indifference which this new
country had so mysteriously engendered in her children. And while she
pushed her red cart over the roads, depending for hospitality upon the
kindness of those to whom for years she had ministered in a way she
little understood, two young men in uniform decided to stay for an
afternoon in Portland on their way home to say good-bye to their father
and mother. What happened that afternoon in the cigar store of Raphael
Christmas only one of the three to-day could tell you; but there must
have been something persuasive about the square shoulders of the older
visitor and the straight brown eyes of the younger, for, the next day
but one, a big Scandinavian sold tobacco to whoever wanted it, and told
anybody who asked that the proprietor had gone to war.
Stopping in a small village to get the papers of three days past, Mary
Christmas saw on the front page of one of them a picture and a story
which set the muscles of her arms and legs into such tremor that she
could with difficulty push her cart through the gate of the adjoining
churchyard and up to the steps of the white church. Here she gratefully
sat down in a warm ray of sunshine and tried to sense it all. And as
she saw Raphael’s dark face gazing into her own and read the words that
told of the Erzerum tragedy of more than twenty years ago and that
spoke of Raphael as a hero, ready to avenge, she felt care slip from
her shoulders just as years before she had felt quick relief upon the
setting down of her great bundle on some friendly doorstep. She felt,
too, as she sat there in the sunlight, the rekindling of her spirit,
which, now smothered no longer, burst again into ready flame. If John
Wescott could have seen her then, leaning back against the paneled door
of the old church, her red silk handkerchief on her shoulders, the sun
catching alike the light from the gold coins in her ears and from the
tears that rolled down her tired face, he would have felt convinced
that the impulsive extra hour which he took to interview the city
editor of a Portland paper and which cost him six hours at home was
well worth the price.
When Mary Christmas had convinced herself by twelve more readings
that what the words said was indeed true, she left the church steps,
stopping only to fold the miraculous paper within her gold-laced
bodice and to say a prayer of thanksgiving, and wheeled her cart into
a neighboring barn. Here she left it while she journeyed by stage to
the nearest sizable town, returning the next day with the necessary
purchases for the new work which, she decided, had become hers to
perform. From her packages she brought forth an American flag with
which she covered her cart, and tiny flags of the Allies which she
tacked securely in the corners. Thus decorated, and armed with a
veritable sword of the spirit, she started forth, choosing the most
outlying roads she knew.
That spring and summer, and late into the fall, she forgot her business
of selling in this new and self-imposed task of recruiting for the
army. Into the most remote of farming districts she pushed her gay
cart; in farmhouse kitchens, at crossroads, and among groups of men
at work in the hayfields she gave her stirring message. Nor did she
scorn to use any and every means of persuasion. When the story of her
own wrong at the hands of the enemy failed to arouse more than an
ill-expressed compassion, when the plea for making the world secure
against tyranny and the simple urge of natural patriotism were not
provocative of determination, her racial shrewdness came to her aid
with the suggestion of expediency.
“They will make you go soon,” she would cry to half a dozen young
men, impressed in spite of themselves. “Soon they will come and take
you whether you want to go or not. You are not such a hero then! Go
now--like my son here! Go now and offer yourselves! That is the way!”
Reluctantly she left the roads when the lowering skies foretold snow
and when the hurrying November sun set in a horizon of pale green
beneath overhanging clouds of purple. That winter she gave up her
trade among the railroad towns, and, instead of weaving laces, knit
rough socks of gray wool, sitting with little Mary in the hot back room
of the bakeshop. A peace came to brood over her in those days with
their short twilights. It made her oblivious of her toil-racked body,
and in some strange, quiet way quenched the flames of her spirit until
they glowed in a clear, steady light, a “light that never was on sea or
land.” And when another spring with its drifting petals brought her the
news that Raphael had given his life in France to avenge his father’s
death and to alleviate, if but for a little time, the suffering of the
world, she was quite content.
The drifting petals of that spring brought a message to the Wescott
village also, a message that made Father Wescott again walk up the
street with his collar and tie in their rightful places. He looked old
and stooped as he opened the white gate and went up the driveway in
the drowsy, contented hum of bees and the sweet odor of apple blossoms
in warm sunlight. He did not go back to his office that day or the
next, but sat with Mrs. Wescott in the library or helped her with the
housework, which must be done as carefully and methodically as though
they were not surrounded by some grim, overwhelming presence. And on
the third afternoon, as they sat in the library, Mr. Wescott pasting
stray leaves in old books and Mrs. Wescott darning some table linen
which she had twice thrown away, they heard the grating of the driveway
gravel and saw between the porch shutters a quick flash of red and
black and gold. Then Mary Christmas burst open the door, and, after
throwing herself at Father Wescott’s feet, sat with them quietly until
the shadows on the orchard grass grew longer and a little girl drove
her cow down the hill.
But after her lunch of sandwiches and milk she did not go until she had
entered into every room of the great, empty house. Sitting together
in the library, they heard her softened footsteps upstairs, visiting
every one--that in which Roger had been born, those where he had played
and slept, and in each they heard her high, quavering voice singing a
prayer-song for the rest of his spirit. Downstairs too she knelt and
prayed--in the library where he had read his books, in the dining-room
where he had eaten, even in the great old stable where so many years
ago he had played the part of the priest in the Etchmiadzin church.
Then, her sacrifice ended, she went her way up the hill.
An hour later it came to them who still sat in the library that she had
looked old and tired as she had said good-bye. They might so easily
have taken her on her way! Father Wescott, reproving himself for his
thoughtlessness, coaxed his car into reluctant motion, and with Mrs.
Wescott beside him choked up the hill to overtake Mary Christmas and
to carry her to her next stopping-place or, better still, to bring her
back again with them.
They did not go far. By the path that led to the pasture bars and
thence to Mary Wescott’s boulder, they saw the familiar red cart, still
bedecked with its colors. Halting the car beside it, they hurried up
the path, over the hummocks starred with violets, and through the
alders to the boulder. There by the spring, beneath a wild plum-tree,
white with bloom, lay Mary Christmas in the evening light, her face
relaxed, her busy hands at rest. A song sparrow on the stunted pine
tree filled the still air with notes like crystals in sunlight, and
a robin called from the wild crab-apple on the hill. But Father and
Mother Wescott knew, as they stood there looking upon the quiet face
beneath the white blossoms, that Mary Christmas’ restless, shining
spirit was heeding none of these. It had gone, they knew, in a quick
flash of light across the gray, tossing ocean, to her own land, where
for a season it would wander with the winds on treeless plains, look
upon the ark which no eye had seen, and leave its healing power in the
dim aisles of the church at Etchmiadzin. Then, satisfied and at peace,
it would go to dwell in the Everlasting Halls of God!
XII
MARY CHRISTMAS DAYS
There are still Mary Christmas days in the Wescott village--days when
the sun lies warm on the orchard grass and the petals drift through
the bright air like great lazy snowflakes. Then Father Wescott puts
away the town report and certain prophetic statistics as to the fall
election, closes the office, and comes home at noon for the day,
swinging up the street in precisely the manner of so many years ago.
In the afternoon, under the apple trees, he drowses a bit over his
paper, unless there happens to be a disturbing article on the spread
of Radicalism, while the bees hum among the blossoms, and while Mrs.
Wescott, whom the right of franchise has not changed a whit, completes
a red mitten for her oldest grandson. But when the shadows grow longer
and the village children drive home their cows, they talk of Mary
Christmas. In the evening, as they sit on the porch, Mrs. Wescott
wears a shawl in whose delicate traceries are birds and butterflies,
stars and tired sheep. Once Father Wescott shamefacedly took a string
of red stones from his pocket and put it around his neck, where it
glowed against his white collar and shirt, red as the geraniums in the
porch boxes or as great drops of blood. It must be admitted, however,
that during this procedure he was genuinely embarrassed and kept a
vigilant eye on the driveway and the door.
North of Boston, in the city where William Howe, still a Democrat, is
now president of his company, there are Mary Christmas days. When the
first one comes in June, Mary Wescott hurries home from a mothers’
meeting or from the League of Women Voters, gives the surprised
maid the remainder of the day, and gets dinner herself. Then, while
she prepares the baby’s orange juice (for the times simply demand
that she renounce sulphur and molasses), she tells the children of
Mary Christmas and of all the manifold things that, because of Mary
Christmas, happened to her when she was a little girl. William comes
home as the light softens to find a rush of children at the gate, apple
blossoms on the table, and Mary in a blue gingham apron with some
flour on her pink cheek. And that evening in a quiet house they wonder
what on earth they can give their children to compensate for no Mary
Christmas!
In the college town where Cynthia lives there are Mary Christmas days.
When one steals over the campus and lures students from their books,
Cynthia, too, is lured from Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter and other
ecclesiastical heroes who, colleges so often decree, shall be studied
in the spring. Forgetting them all for a season, Cynthia talks about
words--the glory and magic that lie in so many of them: _silent_,
_holy_, _high_, _garden_. And as her students listen,
perhaps a trifle wonderingly, they see a blue light, the color of
harebells in sunshine, creep into her clear gray eyes and linger there.
But, although they do not know it, there is one word that she does not
name--a word of three letters which years ago unlocked for her the
treasure-house of ages.
There are Mary Christmas days in the city where John works, the city
of Mr. Longfellow and, during her sojourn, of Mary Christmas herself.
Now John has grown into one of those mysterious men who know all about
stocks and bonds and reserve banks and the other entanglements of high
finance. When he reads that “East Cuba Sugar 7½s were active in 106¼,”
he is no more puzzled than you or I when we read that “Mr. and Mrs.
Brown left immediately for Kansas City and points west.” Moreover,
upon occasion he can talk in such terms. But when a Mary Christmas day
brings drifting petals to the old gardens in Portland, and the sun lies
warm on St. Stephen’s church, John forgets all matters of high finance.
His associates have even known him to become irritated when asked a
simple question concerning Missouri Pacific 4s. A restlessness drives
him early from the office and sets him walking far into the country,
along a coast road where the long shadows of the trees are mirrored in
the still water. It is late when he comes back to his rooms, but not
too late for him to light his pipe and to sit by his open window in
the white moonlight. And more than once on nights like these--though
we confess it in the strictest confidence--he has drawn from a faded
green-and-gold box in his trunk a silk cap with many colors in orderly
rows. This he puts upon his head in a most absurd fashion, for it is
much too small for him; and, watching the blue spirals of smoke, he
dreams of a certain day long ago when his father came up the street,
_wearing his collar and tie_!
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
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