Part 6

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!