Part 11

The butcher hung up his stocking, and lonely it looked too, that stocking, as it dangled from his bachelor’s fireplace. The Flinderses hung up their stockings, one on each side of Polly’s; Mrs. Dumpty hung up hers,--oh, all the grown-ups hung up stockings that night. And although they tried to pretend to themselves that it was all in fun, still they all knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t be a bit funny if they should get up the next morning to find these stockings empty and their wishes still just wishes.

Only Mr. and Mrs. Claus did not join in this great stocking ceremony. Something had happened at the Clauses’, which had turned that humble home almost inside out and left no time for such minor considerations as stockings.

Mrs. Claus discovered it just after Santa had left with his pack.

“Now,” said she to Mr. Claus, “I’ll get out the things for _his_ stocking.”

“But he’ll see ’em when he comes in,” objected the baker.

“Now, Mr. Claus, you ought to know by this time he always comes in by the back door and goes up the back steps on Christmas Eve. What’s the harm, then, of getting out the things now and putting them in his stocking in the front room?”

“No harm, no harm at all,” agreed Mr. Claus hastily.

So Mrs. Claus went to her workbasket to get the key to the cupboard in which Santa’s surprises were hidden. The key, oddly enough, was not there.

“Well, that’s funny,” Mrs. Claus said. Whereupon she went to the kitchen shelf, but the key wasn’t there, either. Nor was it behind the clock on the mantel, or in the best alabaster vase in the parlor, or in the old valise upstairs. And if it wasn’t in these treasure troves, where was it? That is what Mrs. Claus wanted to know.

“Where did you put it?” asked the baker innocently.

“How do I know?” retorted Mrs. Claus. “I seemed to remember putting it in all these places, but I didn’t.”

“Look in the almanac,” suggested her husband.

“The almanac!” repeated Mrs. Claus contemptuously, but she looked there just the same.

She also looked in the woodbox and in the apple barrel and in the cooky jar, where no key ought ever to be and where no key was, either. She ripped open the beds and searched under the mattresses, and the fact that her children were in those beds made no whit of difference to Mrs. Claus. She tore up the carpet from under Mr. Claus’s feet; she scratched in the corners of the room like a cat digging for a mouse; she peered sharply down into the stove, and when the key was not discovered there, shook down the coals angrily. And at last, after tearing up the entire house by its roots, she sat down on a chair and looked at Mr. Claus with a tragic face.

“It’s lost,” she announced hoarsely.

“Never mind,” Mr. Claus replied soothingly, “we’ll get another.”

“But it’s a special key,” she wailed, “made specially for this Christmas Eve. And Jack-of-All-Trades is dead asleep by now, and if he wasn’t, he’d never have time now to make another.”

“Well, then, we’ll have to break the door open,” said Mr. Claus.

“But we have no ax!” Poor Mrs. Claus, she had lost all her old enterprise in that short time.

“We’ll borrow one,” replied Mr. Claus, and with that they both leaped out of the kitchen to borrow an ax from the neighbors.

It was exactly midnight when Santa Claus had finished filling the stockings of Simple Simon, Jack and Jill, little Bo-Peep and all the other children of Pudding Lane. He had just clicked Mistress Mary’s gate behind him, when up popped Piggy-Peddler in front of him.

“It’s all right,” whispered Piggy-Peddler delightedly. “It’s going on right now.”

“Oh!” cried Santa Claus. “It is? He’s really turning the clock back?”

“This very minute,” reported Piggy-Peddler.

“But it’s too early, Piggy-Peddler,” said Santa Claus. “The grown-ups will never be awake at this hour. They’ve just gone to bed.”

Piggy-Peddler laughed.

“Don’t you worry about those grown-ups. They’re worse than children ever thought of being. Mark my word, they’re sneaking down the steps right this minute. Father Time knows them; that’s why he set this hour.”

“Are they really going to get the very things they asked for?” asked Santa Claus.

“The very things,” Piggy told him.

“The petticoat?”

“Oh, such a petticoat! A riot of ruffles!” Piggy-Peddler answered.

“A thousand of them?”

“A thousand, and one for good measure. A thousand and one ruffles, Santa Claus.”

“And the baby?”

“The most wonderful baby,” replied Piggy. “He never cries and never wakes up in the middle of the night and never swallows safety pins.”

“Then he isn’t a real baby,” declared Santa Claus. He knew about babies. There had been five of them in his family.

“Yes, he’s a real baby,” Piggy-Peddler insisted. “For he does fall out of bed, and he does eat old shoes, and he does chase sunbeams all over the nursery floor.”

Santa Claus, however, was not quite convinced.

“Does he go into a rage if he can’t get the sunbeam?”

“The most awful rage, bellowing and roaring.”

“No tears though,” supplemented Santa Claus.

“No tears,” corroborated Piggy. “Too mad for tears.”

“Well, I guess he’s a real baby then,” Santa Claus admitted. “But, oh, Piggy, don’t you wish we could peep in at the windows and see the grown-ups getting their Christmas presents?”

“I never wished anything so much in the world,” was Piggy’s heartfelt reply.

“But it isn’t nice to peep in at windows, is it?”

“Peeping is dreadful,” said Piggy-Peddler.

“So I suppose we’d better go home,” suggested Santa.

“I think that’s all we can do,” Piggy agreed.

So Santa Claus went home, and Piggy went to the Horners’, where he was staying over Christmas.

Piggy did not go straight to bed, however, for not only did he find Mr. and Mrs. Horner up and gloating over the lovely gifts in their Christmas stockings, but he found Jack Horner up too--think of it, on Christmas Eve--and moreover, making a great to-do about his Christmas pie.

“He wants to eat it now,” Mrs. Horner told Piggy.

“Well, let him eat it then,” advised Piggy-Peddler, disgusted.

You couldn’t do anything with a boy like Jack, he was thinking, and there was no use trying.

The rest of the grown-ups, however, had no such difficulties to spoil their Christmas stockings, and right that minute they were all tiptoeing down to their front parlors just as Piggy-Peddler said they would be doing.

Mrs. Dumpty, in her pink flannel nightgown and with her eyes bulging over her sputtering candle, was the first one down. She craned her neck as she got near the stocking, and her eyes, pushing themselves almost out of their sockets, searched the dimness intently. Would the petticoat be there? Oh, beating heart, be still! Supposing it were not--

Ah, but there it was, the petticoat of her heart, lovelier even than she had imagined. Such foamy ruffles! So many of them! Oh, what a petticoat! Suddenly Mrs. Dumpty threw it around her and rushed out. Where was the woman going?

At about the same time old Cross-Patch came shuffling in to her stocking. She hadn’t slept much in her excitement, but had lain there tense and still until at last she could stand it no longer. There she came, shuffle, shuffle. She held the candle high and squinted at the stocking. Was that--could it be--a baby’s fuzzy head poking up out of the top? It was! Oh, happy old Cross-Patch. She pinched the baby to see if it were real; she grunted and chuckled and cackled. She wasn’t a bit cross now. Then, taking the baby under one arm, she too rushed out and away.

And did the candlestick-maker get his swallow-tail coat? He did. Pearl buttons, hankersniff and all? Pearl buttons, hankersniff and all. Did Mr. Flinders find himself possessed of pigs? Most assuredly. Red little pigs, big black pigs, middle-aged speckled pigs, and all grunting and wallowing in a manner to delight any pig-lover’s heart.

But surely the butcher didn’t find a wife in his stocking? Well, he just did. A charming lady with a pink cheek, a high heel, and a mincing step, a woman exactly to the butcher’s taste. Old Mother Hubbard got her hurdy-gurdy too, and you should have seen her and the dog dancing to its music.

But the strange thing was that all of them took their gifts in their arms and rushed out from their homes, just as Mrs. Dumpty and Cross-Patch had done. They all went to the same place too, and that place was--guess where--the Old Woman’s Shoe.

Words fail me as I try to describe the scene they all found in the once humble old Shoe. There was the Shoe ablaze with light and color; there were the ladies and gentlemen of the ball, in satins and velvet, bowing and pirouetting; there was Prince Charming himself, the most agreeable man you ever want to see; and finally there was the Old Woman, gay as a feather, almost unrecognizable now in her fine red dress and her gold, gold slippers.

With great hilarity the Old Woman greeted her friends, and if she kissed Mr. Horner and shook hands with Mrs. Horner instead of the other way around, as she intended, nobody minded, especially Mr. Horner. Indeed, so enlivened became the gentlemen that they all said they wanted such a handshake,--which was certainly a gay turn for the party to take.

So they frolicked on and danced and were merry. Oh, yes, they admired each other’s Christmas presents too. The butcher’s wife was received with great cordiality, Cross-Patch’s baby was declared to be the nicest baby everybody had ever seen; and Mother Hubbard’s hurdy-gurdy rolled out its lovely tunes as Mrs. Dumpty, in her ruffled petticoat and the candlestick-maker, in his tails, stepped gravely through a minuet.

Only the Clauses were not there.

But we know where they were, don’t we? Or do we?

For if Mr. Claus at that moment didn’t come tumbling head-first into the Shoe, and if Mrs. Claus didn’t come falling in after him, and then, right on their heels, if Jack Horner didn’t burst in on everybody.

“We want an ax!” shouted Mr. Claus. “Been all over the whole town and not a soul was home.”

“An ax!” they all shouted back at him.

“But look here!” called out Little Jack Horner.

He was holding up a tiny something in his hand.

“What’s that?” they asked.

“I stuck in my thumb,” began Jack Horner.

“Oh, it’s only that old plum he’s always talking about,” said Mrs. Grundy.

“No, ma’am,” Jack cried excitedly, “it’s not a plum. It’s a key. I stuck in my thumb and pulled out a--key!”

Everybody gasped, Mrs. Claus gave a jump, and as for Mr. Claus, “Great snakes!” he roared. “It’s it!”

And before anybody could say another word, he had snatched the key from Jack Horner’s hands and was gone, leaving Mrs. Claus to explain the whole thing, a feat she accomplished with much hemming and hawing.

For Mrs. Claus, you see, in her excitement had baked the key to the cupboard in Jack Horner’s Christmas pie. Nobody knows how in the world she could have done such a thing, and indeed, to this day she swears she _couldn’t_ have done it, but she did do it, just the same, and everybody knows it.

The people of Pudding Lane were very kind to her about this mistake.

“Never mind, Mrs. Claus,” said the Old Woman comfortingly, “it’s all right now. Mr. Claus has gone home to get the things out of the cupboard and Santa Claus will have his Christmas stocking just the same, even if you did think the key was a plum.”

“I didn’t,” retorted Mrs. Claus. “Whoever could think a key was a plum?”

“Well,” cackled the candlestick-maker, “you put the key into the plum pie, Mrs. Claus.”

Mrs. Claus wrung her hands and could make no answer.

“Shame on you, candlestick-maker,” said Cross-Patch reprovingly. “Your tails have made you cruel, sir. Cheer up, Mrs. Claus,” she went on, “it’s just as the Old Woman said. Santa Claus will have his Christmas stocking, after all, and there’s nothing to worry about now.”

“Well, then,” spoke the Old Woman, “we ought to go on with our party, oughtn’t we?”

“We ought to, I suppose,” said Mrs. Dumpty, smoothing her ruffles, “but--”

“But what, Mrs. Dumpty?” asked Mr. Flinders from among his litter of pigs.

“But--” Mrs. Dumpty hesitated again, “well, the truth is, neighbors, I’ve had about enough of party.”

The candlestick-maker stopped switching his coat-tails to give vent to a great yawn.

“Wouldn’t mind going to bed myself,” he admitted.

“The baby’s asleep,” said Cross-Patch. “I guess I’ll go home.”

The Old Woman rubbed her eyes.

“Balls are all right,” she said, “but bed is the place for old women at this time of the night.”

And that was the end of the lovely Christmas party. It was the end of the pigs and the ruffles and the swallow-tail coat; it was the end even of the butcher’s wife and Cross-Patch’s baby. They had had their wishes, those grown-ups of Pudding Lane, every one of them, and they had enjoyed that Christmas Eve as they had never enjoyed anything else before. But now they were just their old selves again and wanted to go to bed. Father Time had turned the clock up again, you see, and their hour of youth was past.

But Santa Claus’s hour was not past, no indeed.

For the next morning, when he came clattering down the stairs to see his brothers and sister open their Christmas stockings, what should he see but his own red stocking hanging there, with a great sign on it, saying, “Merry Christmas, little Santa, from all your loving friends!”

And what should he find in that stocking but Judy’s mittens, and Jack and Jill’s orange tree (and it did have a tiny white blossom on it, after all) and the whistle that Humpty-Dumpty had carved for him? And what was there all around that stocking but piles and piles and piles of gifts, the nicest things that could be bought in Banbury Cross?

Was he surprised? He nearly swooned, that fat little boy, so surprised was he. Did he like his gifts? You should have heard him chuckle and shout and exclaim. Was he touched at the thoughtfulness of his friends? He thanked them and thanked and thanked them, until they stopped their ears, and he told his mother that night that never in all the world were there any such people as those in Pudding Lane. He was curious, too, to know how they managed it all.

“Who brought the things down the chimney?” he wanted to know.

“King Cole,” Mrs. Claus told him.

“King Cole himself?”

“King Cole himself,” said Mrs. Claus, but she did not add that the King had stuck in the chimney on the way down and had to be pulled through by his feet, although that really happened.

So that’s the way it all came out.

Father Time turned back the clock so that the grown-ups could be young again and have the wishes of their youth. Jack Horner, the glutton, ate his Christmas pie too early, but, by doing so, saved the day. For if he hadn’t, they wouldn’t have found the key, and Santa Claus might not have had his wonderful Christmas stocking. Oh, yes, they would have taken the ax to the cupboard, I suppose, but that’s no way to open a cupboard, after all.

THE END

Transcriber's Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.