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Read Ebook: Christmas: A Story by Gale Zona Solon Leon V Leon Victor Illustrator
Font size: Background color: Text color: Add to tbrJar First Page Next PageEbook has 69 lines and 6382 words, and 2 pagesmb thanksgiving that the child was running at her side. And the vision that she saw streamed down from Capella, of the brightness of an hundred of our suns, the star that stood in the east above the village where she lived. Lanterns glowed through the roadside shrubbery, little kindly lights, like answers; and at a bend in the road voices burst about them, and Buff Miles and the children, Gussie and Bennet and Tab and Pep and little Emily, ran, singing, and closed about Mary and the child, and went on with them, slipping into the "church choir Christmas carols," and more, that Buff had been fain to teach them. The music filled the quiet night, rose, in the children's voices, like an invocation to all time. "One for the way it all begun, Two for the way it all has run, What three'll be for I do forget, But what will be has not been yet. So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe Over and over and over, oh!" Between songs the children whispered together for a minute. "What's the new little boy's name?" asked Tab. Nobody knew. That would be something to find out. "Ain't we going to bury Sandy Claus right after breakfast?" demanded Gussie. And all the children, even little Emily, answered: "No, let's not." They all went on together and entered Mary's gate. Those within,--hearing the singing, had opened the door, and they brought them through that deep arch of warmth and light. Afterward, no one could remember whether or not the greeting had been "Merry Christmas," but there could have been no mistaking what everybody meant. At his gate in the street wall lined with snow-bowed lilacs and mulberries, Ebenezer Rule waited in the dark for his two friends to come back. He had found Kate Kerr in his kitchen methodically making a jar of Christmas cookies. And to her stupefaction he had dispatched her to Mary Chavah's with her entire Christmas baking in a basket. "I don't believe they've got near enough for all the folks I see going," he explained it. Then this vast egoism had heard itself expressed in the mention of Bruce's baby--the third generation. But by the great sorcery wherewith Nature has protected herself, this mammoth sense of self, when it extends unto the next generations, becomes a keeper of the race. Ebenezer had been touched, relaxed, disintegrated. Here was an interest outside himself which was yet no external. Vast, level reaches lay about that fact, and all long unexplored. But these were peopled. He saw them peopled.... Gradually he let himself face what it was that he was wanting to do. And when he faced that, he left the hobbyhorse where it was under the wall and went into the street. He took his place among the externals of the Winter night, himself unconscious of them. The night, with all its content, a thing of explicable fellowships, lay waiting patiently for those of its children who knew its face. In the dark and under the snow the very elements of earth and life were obscured, as in some clear wash correcting too strong values. He moved along the village, and now his dominant consciousness was the same consciousness in which that little village lived. But he knew it only as the impulse that urged him on toward Jenny's house. If he went to Jenny's, if he signified so that he wished not to be cut off from her and Bruce and the baby, if he asked Bruce to come back to the business, these meant a lifetime of modification to the boy's ideals for that business, and modification to the lives of the "hands" back there in Mary Chavah's house--and to something else.... "What else?" he asked himself. Mechanically he looked up and saw the heavens crowded with bright watchers. In that high field one star, brighter than the others, hung over the little town. He found himself trying to see the stars as they had looked to him years ago, when they and the night had seemed to mean something else.... "What else?" he asked himself. The time did not seem momentous. It was only very quiet. Nothing new was there, nothing different. It had always been so. The night lay in a sovereign consciousness of being more than just itself. "Do you think that you are all just you and nothing else?" it was seen to be compassionately asking. "What else?" Ebenezer asked himself. He did not face this yet. But in that hour which seemed pure essence, with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward Jenny's house. Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where, in the dark, the tree stood. He had wanted the door to be ajar "so the things I think about can go back and forth," he had explained. In the dining room she wrapped herself in the gray shawl and threw up the two windows. New air swept in, cleansing, replacing, prevailing. Her guests had left her early, as is the way in Old Trail Town. Then she had had her first moments with the child alone. He had done the things that she had not thought of his doing but had inevitably recognized: Had delayed his bed-going, had magnified and repeated the offices of his journey, had shown her the contents of his pockets, had repeatedly mentioned by their first names his playmates in Idaho and shown surprise when she asked him who they were. Mary stood now by the window conscious of a wonderful thing: That it seemed as if he had been there always. In the clean inrush of the air she was aware of a faint fragrance, coming to her once and again. She looked down at her garden, lying wrapped in white and veiled with black, like some secret being. Three elements were slowly fashioning it, while the fourth, a soft fire within her, answered them. The fragrance made it seem as if the turn of the year were very near, as if its prophecy, evident once in the October violets in her garden, were come again. But when she moved, she knew that the fragrance came from within the room, from Ellen Bourne's Christmas rose, blossoming on the table.... Above, her eye fell on the picture that Jenny had brought to her on that day when she had all but emptied the house, as if in readiness. Almost she understood now the passionate expectation in that face, not unlike the expectation of those who in her dream had kept saying "You." There was a movement in her garden and on the walk footsteps. The three men stepped into the rectangle of lamplight--Abel, Ames and Simeon, who had left the party a little before the others and, hurrying back with the gifts that they planned, had met Ebenezer at his gate, getting home from Jenny's house. In Abel's arms was something globed, like a little world; in Simeon's, the tall, gray-gowned Saint Nicholas taken from the Exchange window, the lettered sign absent, but the little flag still in his hand; and Ebenezer was carrying the hobbyhorse. If at him the other two had wondered somewhat, they had said nothing, in that fashion of treating the essential which is as peculiar to certain simple, robust souls as to other kinds of great souls. "Has the boy gone to bed?" Abel asked without preface. "Yes," Mary answered, "he has. I'm sorry." "Never mind," Simeon whispered, "you can give him these in the morning." Mary, her shawl half hiding her face, stooped to take what the three lifted. "They ain't presents, you know," Abel assured her positively. "They're just--well, just to let him know." Mary set the strange assortment on the floor of the dining room--the things that were to be nothing in themselves, only just "to let him know." "Thank you for him," she said gently. "And thank you for me," she added. Ebenezer fumbled for a moment at his beaver hat, and took it off. Then the other two did so to their firm-fixed caps. And with an impulse that came from no one could tell whom, the three spoke--the first time hesitatingly, the next time together and confidently. "Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas," they said. Mary Chavah lifted her hand. "Merry Christmas!" she cried. The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author, and new fiction. THE OTHER BOOKS OF MISS GALE Mothers to Men Decorated cloth, 12mo, .50 net; by mail, .62 The author is singularly successful in detaching herself from all the wear and tear of modern life and has produced a book filled with sweetness, beautiful in ideas, charming in characterizations, highly contemplative, and evidencing a philosophy of life all her own. Friendship Village Cloth, 12mo, .50 The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre Cloth, 12mo, .50 Friendship Village Love Stories Decorated cloth, gilt top, 12mo, .50 Miss Gale's pleasant and highly individual outlook upon life has never been revealed to better advantage than in these charming stories of the heart affairs of the young people of Friendship Village. NEW MACMILLAN FICTION Cloth, 12mo, .25 net; postpaid, .36 Cloth, 12mo, .35 net; postpaid, .47 Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page |
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