Kitabı oku: «The Doctor's Christmas Eve», sayfa 10
II
FOUR IN A CAGE
The four children early that afternoon were shut in the library with instructions from the mother of the household: it was too cold to go out of doors any more – this was given as gentle counsel to the visitors; their father – here the head was shaken warningly at the other two – their father was finishing some very important work in his library and must not be disturbed by noises; she herself could not be with them longer because – her eyes spoke volumes of delightful mysteries, a volume that suggested preparations for the coming Night. So they must entertain themselves with whatever was within reach: there were games, there were books; especially wonderful old Christmas tales. They must not forget to read from these. Finally she summed up: they must remember in whatever they did and whatever they said that they were American children playing on Christmas Eve – the last of the Kentucky Christmas Eves in that house!
The children thought, at least Elsie thought, that they would have a better time if they were allowed to be simply children instead of American children: and she said so. She was of the opinion that being American interfered a good deal with being natural. But the rejoinder, made with graciousness and responsive humor, was that the American back was fitted to the burden and that no doubt the burden was fitted to the back: at least they could try it and see – and the door was softly closed.
The children gathered almost immediately about a centre-table on which were books and many magazines, very modern and very American magazines, which were pleasantly lighted of evenings by a reading-lamp. The two children who were at home were much used to catching echoes from those magazines as expounded and discussed by mature heads. What attracted them all now was neither lamp nor literature, but a silver tray bearing plates and knives and napkins.
"It looks as though we were going to have something delicious," said Elizabeth daintily; and she peeped under a napkin, adding with disappointment: "O dear! I am afraid it is going to be fruit!"
Even as she spoke there was a knock on the door as though something had been delayed, and the door was reopened far enough to admit the maternal hand grasping the handle of a massive old fruit basket piled with apples. There was a rush to the door, and another protest: "Only apples, and there are barrels of them in the cellar: why not potatoes and be done with it! Entertain one's company on apples!" But the door was closed firmly, and thus the situation appeared to settle down for the rest of the afternoon.
It soon having become a problem of whether the apples should go to the children or the children go to the apples, Elizabeth decided that it should be solved in the human way; and she led the group back to the table under guidance of Elsie's eyes, which more than once had turned in that direction with a delicate, not to say indelicate, suggestion.
"I suppose it is better than starving," she remarked apologetically, adjusting her glasses in order to find the next best apple for Herbert after Harold had given the best to Elsie, and as she peeled her apple, she added with some instinct of regret that she was offering her guests refreshments so meagre: —
"How much better turkey and plum pudding sound in the old Christmas stories than they are when you have them!"
Elsie did not agree with this view. "I think it is much better to have them," she said.
"But in your mind's eye – " pleaded Elizabeth.
"I don't know so well about that eye!" said Elsie.
"Oh, but, Elsie," insisted Elizabeth with a rising enthusiasm, "in Dickens' Christmas Carol wouldn't you rather the big prize turkey were whirled away in the cab to the Bob Cratchits?"
"I must say that I should not," contended Elsie.
"But the plum pudding, Elsie!" cried Elizabeth, now in the full glow of a beautiful ardor; "when Mrs. Cratchit brings in the plum pudding looking like a speckled cannon-ball, hard and firm and blazing with brandy and with Christmas holly stuck in the top of it, wouldn't you rather the little Cratchits ate that?"
"Indeed I would!" said Elsie; "for I never cared for that pudding; they were welcome to it."
Elizabeth dropped her head and was silent; then she murmured, in wounded loyalty to the Cratchits: "It must have been good! Because Dickens said they ate all of it and wanted more. But they tried to look as though they'd had quite sufficient; and I think they were very nice about it, Elsie, for children who had had so little training. They behaved as very well bred, indeed."
"I don't doubt it," said Elsie. "I have nothing against their manners. And I suppose they thought it a good pudding! I merely remarked that I did not think it a good pudding! They had their opinion, and I have my opinion of that pudding."
The subject was abandoned, but a moment later revived by Herbert, sitting at Elizabeth's side: —
"Dickens had a great many more things in the Carol than the turkey and the plum pudding," he observed, with his habit of taking in everything; and he began with a memorized list of the Carol's Christmas luxuries in one heap – passing from geese to punch. "I always like Dickens: he gives you plenty," he concluded.
"Oh, bother!" said Harold, the Kentucky Saxon whose forefathers had been immigrants from Dickens' land. "We have everything in Kentucky that they had, and more besides. They can keep their Dickens!"
"Oh, but Harold," pleaded Elizabeth, "we haven't any American Christmas stories! Not one old fairy tale – not one!"
"We don't want any old English fairy tales. American children don't want fairy tales. Couldn't we have them if we wanted them? I should say so. Can't we make anything in our country that we want?"
"But the little Cratchits, Harold!" insisted Elizabeth, "we do want the little Cratchits!"
"We have plenty of American Cratchits just as good – and much worse."
The eating of the apples now went on silently, Elizabeth having been worsted in her battle for the Cratchits. But soon as hostess she made another effort to be charming.
"Mamma tells us that whenever we have anything very very good, we must always remember to leave a little for Lazarus. Especially at Christmas – we must remember to share with Lazarus – to leave something on our plates for him."
"Well," said Elsie, "Herbert and I have always been taught to leave something on our plates for good manners. But I never heard good manners called Lazarus. I didn't suppose Lazarus had any manners!"
Elizabeth's face and neck was colored with a quick flame, and she bent her head over her plate until her hair covered her eyes. She undertook an explanation: —
"I think I know what mamma meant, Elsie. Mamma always means a great deal. It was this way: long, long ages ago all over the world people had to divide with imaginary beings: every year they had to give so much, part of everything they owned. Then by and by – I don't know the exact date, Elsie, dear, and I don't think it makes much difference; but by and by there weren't any more imaginary beings. Mamma said that they all disappeared, going down the road of the world."
"But who got all the things?" asked Elsie. "The imaginary beings didn't get them."
"I suppose that is another story," said Elizabeth, who was determined this time not to be browbeaten. "Then just as they all disappeared down the road, from the opposite direction there came the figure of a man – Lazarus. Of course I can't tell it as mamma explains it to me, but this is what it comes to: that for ages and ages people were compelled to give up a share of what they had to imaginary beings; but now there aren't any imaginary beings, and we must divide with people we actually see."
"I don't actually see Lazarus," said Elsie.
"But with your mind's eye – !"
"Oh, that eye – !"
"Mamma thought she would give us a good send-off for Christmas Eve," murmured Elizabeth with another wound: she had been as unfortunate in her crusade for Lazarus as she had been with her tirade for the Cratchits.
Elsie and Harold had pushed back their chairs and frolicked away to a distant part of the room to an unfinished game of backgammon. Elizabeth dipped her fingers into her finger-bowl, and with admiration watched Elsie in her beauty and bouncing proportions: for she was a beautiful child – with the beauty of round healthy vegetables displayed on market stalls, causing you to feel comfortable and human. As for Elizabeth, her thinness had been her pathos: from earliest childhood she had been made to realize on school playgrounds and in all juvenile companies that very thin children win no kind of leadership: with an instinct sure and no doubt wise, children uniformly give their suffrages to the fat, and vote by the pound. Now she looked longingly at the bewitching vision of her opposite – at the heavy braids of chestnut hair hanging down the broad back and tied with a bit of blue-checked ribbon – a back that would have made three of her backs. One day while being dressed by her mother she had remarked regarding herself that she was glad she was no longer: she might be taken for the sea-serpent.
Elsie was dressed in a shade of brown that suggested a blend of the colors of good morning coffee with Durham cream in it and Kentucky waffles: a kind of general breakfast brown.
Then Elizabeth's glance came home to Herbert at her side. He was dressed in much the same shade of brown. But something in his nature transmuted this, and he rather seemed clad in a raiment that suggested spun oak leaves as in autumn they lie at the bottom of still pools when the blue of the sky falls on them and chill winds pass low. Her tenderness suddenly enfolded him: it was the first time he had ever come to stay all night: it gave her an intimate sense of proprietorship in him. She settled down into her chair – the large, high-backed, parental chair – and began rather plaintively – but also not without stratagem – having first looked quickly to see that Elsie was at a safe distance: —
"Mamma says that if you have red hair and are born ugly, and grow uglier, and are very thin, and are named Elizabeth, and no one loves you, you may become a very dangerous person. She's positive that was the trouble with Queen Elizabeth. Some day it may be natural for me to want to cut off somebody's head – I don't know whose yet – but somebody's. Mamma and I are alike: if we were not loved, it would be the end of us."
(To think that even this innocent child should have had such guile!) A head of chestnut hair was unexpectedly moved around in front of Elizabeth's glasses and a pair of eyes peeped in through those private windows: peeped – disappeared. From the other chair a voice sounded, becoming confidential: —
"Some time before you are grown, Elizabeth, some one is going to tell you something."
"I wish I knew what it was now!" murmured Elizabeth.
"You will know when the time comes."
"I don't see why the time doesn't come now."
"Before you are grown?"
"It's the same thing – I feel grown – for the moment!"
Elizabeth looked around again to see where Elsie was.
"I'd like to ask you a question, Elizabeth."
"I should be pleased to answer the question."
"But father told me not to ask any questions: I was to wait till I got back home and ask him."
"I think that is very strange! Aren't there questions a boy can't ask his father? A father wouldn't be the right one to answer. You must ask the one who can answer!"
There was no reply.
"Well," urged Elizabeth, feeling the time was short (there have been others!), "if you can't ask it, pop it! If you can't ask the question, pop the question."
And then – clandestinely down behind the backs of the chairs! And not on the cheek! Exact style of the respondent not accurately known – probably early Elizabethan.
Toward the middle of the afternoon as they played further about the room in search of whatever entertainment it afforded, they stopped before an old cabinet with shelves arranged behind glass doors.
On one of the upper shelves stood some little oval frames of blue or of rose-colored velvet; and in the frames were miniatures of women of old Southern days with bare ivory necks and shoulders and perhaps a big damask rose on the breast or pendent in a cataract of curls behind the ear: women who made you think what must have been the physical and mental calibre of the men who had captured them and held them captured: Elizabeth's grandmothers and aunts on the mother's side. The two girls, each with an arm around the other's waist and heads close together, peered through the glass doors at the vital dames.
"Don't they look as though they liked to dance and to eat and to manage everything and everybody?" said Elsie, always practical.
"Don't they look proud!" said Elizabeth proudly, "and true! and don't they look alive!"
But she linked her arm in Elsie's and drew her away to something else, adding in delicate confidence: "I think I am glad, though, Elsie, that mamma does not look like them. There is no one in the world like mamma! I am a little like her, but I dwindled. Children do dwindle nowadays, don't they?"
"Not I," said Elsie. "I didn't dwindle. Do you notice any dwindling anywhere about me? Please say where."
On the middle and lower shelves of the cabinet were some long-ago specimens of mounted wild duck; and on the moss-ragged boughs of an artificial oak some age-moulted passenger pigeons. The boys talked about these, and told stories of their grandfathers' hunting days when pigeons in multitudes flecked the morning sky on frosty mornings or had made blue feathery clouds about the oak trees in the vast Kentucky pastures.
Following this lead, the boys went to the book-shelves, and taking down a volume of Audubon's great folio work on American Birds, they spread it open on the carpet and, sprawling before it, found the picture of the vanished wild pigeon there, and began to read about him.
Observing this, Elizabeth and Elsie took down a volume of the same great man's work on American Animals; and with it open before them on the floor a few yards away, facing the boys, they began to turn the pages, looking indifferently for whatever beasts might appear.
Elizabeth's peculiar interest in animal pictures had begun during the summer previous, when the family were having a vacation trip in Europe. Upon her visits to galleries of paintings she had repeatedly encountered the same picture: The Manger with the Divine Child as the centre of the group; and about the Child, half in shadow, the donkey and others of his lowly fellows of the stall – all turned in brute adoration. The memory of these Christmas pictures came vividly back to her now – especially the face of the donkey who was always made to look as though he had long been expecting the event; and whereas reasonably gratified, could not definitely say that he was much surprised: his entire aspect being that of a creature too meek and lowly to think that anything foreseen by him could possibly be much of a miracle.
Once also she had seen another animal picture that fascinated her: it represented a blond-haired little girl of about her own age, with bare feet, hair hanging down, a palm branch in her hand. She was escorted by a troop of wild animals, each vying with the other in attempt to convince this exceptional little girl that nothing could induce them just at present to be carnivorous.
The most dangerous beasts walked at the head of the line; the less powerful took their places in the rear; and the procession gradually tapered off in the distance until only the smallest creatures were to be seen struggling resolutely along in the parade. The meaning of the picture seemed to be that nothing harmful could come from the animal kingdom on this particular day, providing the animals were allowed to arrange themselves as specified in the procession. What might have happened on the day preceding or the day following was not guaranteed; nor what might have befallen the little girl on this day if she had not been a blonde; nor what might overtake little boys, dark or fair, at any time. This picture also was in Elizabeth's memory as she turned Audubon's mighty pages; but somehow no American animals seemed to be represented in it: probably absenting themselves through the American desire – ranging through the whole animal kingdom – not to appear sentimental. All, no doubt, would have been glad to parade behind Elizabeth; but they must have agreed that only the sheep in the United States has the right to look sheepish.
The boys, sitting behind the Birds, and the girls sitting behind the Quadrupeds, turned the leaves and began to toss their comments and their fun back and forth.
"The wild pigeon is gone," said Harold, whose ideas on this subject and others related to it showed that he had listened with a good purpose to a father who was a naturalist and patriotic American. "The wild pigeon is gone, and the buffalo is gone, and the deer is going, and all the other big game is gone or is going, and the birds are going, and the forests are going, and the streams are going, and the Americans are going: everything is going but the immigrants – they are coming."
"Oh, but, Harold, we were immigrants once," admitted Elizabeth.
"We were Anglo-Saxon immigrants," said the son of his father; "and they're the only kind for this country. If all the rest of the country were like Kentucky, it wouldn't be so bad. And we American boys have got to get busy when we are men, or there won't be any real Americans left: I expect to stand for a big family, I do," he affirmed to Herbert as though he somehow appropriated the privilege and the glory of it.
"So do I intend to stand for a big family," replied Herbert quickly and jealously, now that matters seemed to be on a satisfactory basis with Elizabeth.
"We boys are going to do our part," called out the Anglo-Saxon to the girls sitting opposite. "You American girls will have to do yours!"
"We shall be quite ready," Elizabeth sang back dreamily.
"We shall be ready," echoed Elsie, not to be excluded from her full share in future proceedings, "and we shall be much pleased to be ready!"
The boys turning the pages of the Birds had reached the picture of the American robin redbreast; and the girls turning the pages of the Quadrupeds had reached the picture of the American rabbit; Elizabeth was softly stroking its ears and coat.
"I think," said Herbert, looking across at Elizabeth, and also of that cordial lusty household bird whose picture was before him, "I think that if a real American were to begin at twenty and keep on until he was, say, ninety, he'd be able to down the immigrants with a family."
"Why ninety?" inquired Elizabeth, looking tenderly back at him and apparently disturbed by the fixing of an arbitrary limit.
"That's all the Bible allows; then you take a rest."
"Oh, then our family didn't want any rest," exclaimed Harold; "for grandfather had a child when he was ninety-one: isn't that so, Elizabeth?"
"Oh, Harold! You've got that wrong. It wasn't grandmother, you dear lamb! Wasn't it a woman in the Old Testament – Sarah – or Hagar – or maybe Rebecca?"
"Anyhow, I'm right about grandfather! I'm positive he had one. Hurrah for grandfather! He was the right kind of American! When I'm a man, I'll be the right kind: I'll have the largest family in this neighborhood."
"Don't say that! Take that back!"
"I will say it, and I do say it!"
"Then – take —that!"
The member of the military institute received a slap in the mouth from a masculine overgrown hand which caused him to measure the length of his spine backward on a large damask rose in the velvet carpet.
They fought as two young males should, one of whom had recently imagined himself the last of the Saxon kings and the other of whom had realized himself as an accepted lover. They fought for a moment over the priceless folio of Audubon and ruined those open pages where the robin, family-bird of the yards, had innocently brought on the fray. They fought round the room, past furniture and over it: Elsie following with delight and wishing that each would be well punished; Elizabeth following in despair, broken-hearted lest either should be worsted.
"The idea of two brats fighting over which is going to have the largest family!" cried the former.
"Oh, Harold, Harold, Harold!" implored Elizabeth. "To fight in your own house!"
"Where could I fight if I didn't fight in my own house?" shouted the Saxon. "I couldn't fight in his."
"Yes; you can fight in mine – whenever you've a mind!" shouted his hospitable foe.
Then something intervened – miraculously. The boys had reached the farther end of the library and the locked doors. There they had clinched again, and there they went down sidewise with a heavy fall against those barriers. As they started to their feet to close in again, the miracle took place – a real miracle, and most appropriate to Christmas Eve. In the Middle Ages such a miracle would have given rise to a legend, a saint, a shrine, and relics.
Elizabeth, who had hung upon the edge of battle, was the first to see it. As her brother rose, she threw herself upon him and whispered:
"Oh, look, Harold! Now you'll stop!"
Through the large empty keyhole of the locked doors an object was making its way: first one long green finger appeared, and then a second, and then a third – those three sacred fingers – as old as Buddha! They made their way into the air of the library, followed by a foot or more of timber; and the fingers and arm taken together constituted a broken-off bough of the Christmas Tree: sign of peace and good will on earth on that Eve: a true modern miracle!
But the member of the military institute did not see it in that light; what it suggested to him was the memory of certain green twigs that in earlier years had played stingingly around a pair of bare disobedient legs – wanton disturbers of common household peace; and as he stood there remembering, his recollection was further assisted by certain minatory movements of the sacred bough itself in the keyhole – a reminder that the same hand was now at the end of the switch. It was not the miraculous that persuaded him: it was the much too natural! But then is not the natural in such a case miraculous enough? To take a small green cylinder of vegetable tissue and apply it to a larger unclad cylinder of animal tissue, with a spasmodic contraction of muscular tissue, and get a moral result from the gray matter of the distant brain: is not that miraculous enough? If people must hunt for miracles and must have them, can they not find all they want in the natural?
There was stillness in the library as that green bough slowly disappeared. The rabbit and the robin, the latter badly torn, got put back upon the shelves in their respective volumes. And presently there was nothing more to be seen but four laughing children.
And now it was getting late. Outside and all over the land snow was falling – the longed-for snow of Christmas Eve. And the last thing to chronicle regarding the afternoon was a reading.
The little gray-toned lad with the mop of whitish hair and the profile of white flint had straggled back to the story which had absorbed him earlier that day – The Book of the World's Great Battles; and he had read to his listeners seated around him the story of the sad battle of Hastings when Saxon Harold fell, and green Saxon England with its mighty throne was lost to fair-haired Saxon men and women – for a long, sad time.
This boy was living very close to the mind of a father who was watching the history of his country; and his own brain was full of small echoes, which perhaps did not echo very fully and truly.
"That is the kind of battle we are going to fight," he said. "England had to fight her immigrants, and we some day shall have to fight our immigrants! Because they will bring into our country old things from their old countries, and we won't have those old things. They are the ones that brought in this silly old Santa Claus."
"If there is a war," said the son of the doctor, "I'll be the surgeon; and I know of two salves already – one for wounds that are open and one for wounds that might as well be. It's a salve that father got in France; and they may have used it at the battle of Waterloo; that's why there were so many soldiers limping around afterwards."
"Well, Herbert," said Elsie, "it couldn't have been such a wonderful salve if it set everybody to limping."
"Well, it is either limp or be dead: so they limped."
"What I like about the French," said Harold, remembering a summer spent in France, "is the big red breeches on the soldiers: then you've got the gore on you all the time, whether you're fighting or not."
Elizabeth's mild beam of humor saw a chance to shine: —
"Oh, but, Harold," she exclaimed, "they are so dangerous! You know the towns were full of soldiers, and there wasn't one in the country. If a soldier is seen in the pastures, the French bulls get after them! Blue is better: then you aren't chased!"
It had come Elizabeth's time to read. She made preparations for it with the finest sense of how beautiful an occasion it was going to be: she hunted for the best chairs; she pushed them together near one of the windows where the last afternoon light from the snow-darkened sky began to fall mystically; then she went to the children's corner of Fairy Tales and softly peered along the shelf; and she drew out a well-remembered volume. Then, seating herself before her auditors, she began in the sweetest, most faltering of voices to read a story that in earlier years had charmed them all.
She had scarcely begun before she discovered that she no longer had an audience: nobody listened. Saddest of all, Elizabeth found that she did not herself listen: she could no longer draw close even to the boundaries of that once magical world: it was gone from her and now she herself loved it only as she saw it in the dim distance – on the Elysian Fields of lost things.
There may have been something of import to the future of this nation in the way in which these four country children, crowded as it were on a narrow headland looking toward the Past, there said good-by for the last time to faith in the whole literature of Fairy Land. The splendid, the terrible race of creatures which once had peopled the world of imagination for races and civilizations had now crumbled to dust at the touch of those little minds. For in the hard white light of our New World backward, always backward toward the cradle moves the retreating line of faith in the old superstitions: the shadows of the supernatural retire more and more toward the very curtains that cradle infancy; and it may be that the last miracle of fable will die where it was born – on the lips of the child.
Elizabeth's face flamed red as she shut the book. It was dead to her; but her brain was musical with refrains about things that had gone to those inner Fields of hers; and now as though she felt herself just a little alone – even from Herbert – she walked away to the piano: —
"You wouldn't listen to the story, but you'll have to listen to a song! This is my song to a Fairy – my slumber song! It is away off in the woods, and I go all by myself to where she is, and I sing this song to her." So Elizabeth sang: —
"Over thee bright dews be shaken;
On thine eyelids violets blow;
At thy hand white stars awaken;
Past thee sun and darkness go!
"In the world where thou art vanished,
All dear things are ever young.
I as thou will soon be vanished,
I like thee from nought am sprung.
"Slumber, slumber! Why awaken?
No one now believes in thee.
I shall sleep while worlds are shaken —
No one will believe in me."
It was the poorest, most faltering, yet most faithful voice – the mere note of a linnet long before the singing season has begun. As it died out, she descended from her premature perch and went with her repudiated book to the shelves where it must be put – not to be taken down again. In the shadow of the library and with the uncertainty of her glasses, she fumbled as she sought the place, and the volumes on each side collapsed together. Whereupon a large key slid from the top and fell to the floor. With a low cry of delight – but of regret also – she seized it and held it up: —
"Oh, Harold, the key! I have found it!"
As the others hurried to her, she said to Elsie, as though boys were not fine enough to understand anything so fine: —
"It was like mamma to hide the key there! She gave it to the old Christmas stories to keep and guard!"
Soon after this the children were not seen in the room. Some one came for them, and they were made ready for supper. After supper they were kept well guarded in another part of the house; and at an earlier hour than usual the little flock were herded up-stairs and at the top divided along masculine and feminine by-paths toward drowsy folds.
No lights were brought into the room where they had been playing. The red embers of the anthracite sank lower under their ashes: all was darkness and silence for the mysteries of Christmas Eve.
