Christmas gold, p.344
Christmas Gold, page 344
But all that was changed long ago—changed except to history; and to gratitude which is the memory of the heart. On these plains of Kentucky no wildness any more, nothing unknown lurking anywhere: a deep strong land completely gentled but not weakened; over it drifting the lights and shadows of tranquil skies; and throbbing always in the heart of it a passion of tenderness that draws its wandering children back across all distances and through all years.
Ay, there were three great spirits that walked with the lad that day and with the uncounted army of his peers; the spirit of their race—the old Anglo-Saxon race that has made its best share of the world's history by cutting away with its sword the rotting curtains that conceal sham and superstition; the spirit of his country which moves with resistless strength toward the real and the strong; and the spirit of the plain American home—that fortress where the real and the ideal meet.
II. Four in a Cage
Table of Contents
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!"
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