Part 1
The Man Who Found Christmas
Books By
Walter Prichard Eaton
“The Idyl of Twin Fires” “In Berkshire Fields” “Green Fields and Upland Pastures” “Skyline Camps” “Penguin Persons and Peppermints”
_Copyrighted, 1927_ W. A. WILDE COMPANY _All rights reserved_
THE MAN WHO FOUND CHRISTMAS
MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The Man Who Found Christmas
By Walter Prichard Eaton
Frontispiece by Walter King Stone
W. A. Wilde Company Boston :: Massachusetts
The Man Who Found Christmas
A new generation has come into the world since what is here recorded took place. There has been a mighty war, when “peace on earth” seemed very far away. The automobile has conspired mightily to change our ways of life, possibly our ways of thinking and even feeling. You will find in this story, dear Reader, mention of forgotten things--sleighbells! We today, and especially our young people, are supposed to be more sceptical of sentiment than we were of old; so therefore we are presumably more sceptical of Christmas, which is the feast and holiday of sentiment. But unless this story grievously errs--and how can that be, since it took place as set forth just about twenty years ago?--young people have been sceptical of sentiment before; and if Christmas could prove them wrong then, perhaps it can again. If you and I can learn to drive a motor car, surely St. Nicholas can. Maybe the old world doesn’t change so much as we little, self-important mortals, proud each in our generation, fondly suppose. We may, as we elegantly phrase it, have “debunked” a lot of things since good Victoria went to her rest and Henry Ford and the Kaiser conspired against ours. But here is one bet still laid on Christmas!
Life, of course, may not have been so lively twenty years ago. The life of a young bachelor in New York twenty years ago, at any rate, was humdrum and conventional. It was not popularly supposed to be, but it was. (It certainly isn’t popularly supposed to be today, but probably it is.) Wallace Miller was a young bachelor in New York, the New York when taxi cabs were a novelty and motion pictures cost a nickel, and the only unconventional thing in his life was the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association, which met every Christmas Eve, and dined. And, alas, even that dinner was conventional,--Delmonico’s and dress coats! His profane association numbered six members. There was Mercer, who had organized it and supplied the original profanity; he was city editor of a daily paper, and had to work on Christmas day, so perhaps may be forgiven. There was Jack Gleason, formerly one of Mercer’s reporters but now a playwright, who supplied most of the good spirits, which Mercer said was no wonder, since he had an income of $20,000 a year. There was Gilsey, a short, dark, thick-set, scowling man with an astonishing vocabulary of invective and all the instincts of a born iconoclast, who by day was sub-editor of a mild religious weekly. There were Smith and Stedman, brokers and club mates of Miller’s, who resembled closely their kind, even to the angle at which they pushed back their hats when sitting in the club before dinner. Finally there was Wallace Miller himself, who had begun his New York career after leaving college as a reporter under Mercer, like Gleason, but, being blessed--if it was a blessing--with a small inherited income, had abandoned journalism for “letters,” and sought to create literature in a littered apartment down a side street not too far from his club and the magazine offices.
When Mercer had broached to him the idea of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry- Yule-Tide Association, he had fallen in eagerly with the scheme.
“Fine!” he cried. “I loathe Christmas. The club is always so desolate on that day, and the service so bad! Every year you have to subscribe to an employees’ Christmas fund, and then when the day arrives half the employees are missing and the rest act as if they wish they were. There’s nobody to dine with. You have to sit at the general table, with men you don’t know, and every last one of ’em eats as if his food choked him. It’s worse than Sundays in August. Besides, I’ve got an aunt in Somerville, Mass., who always sends me a present! You bet I’m for the association!”
The other four members had been carefully selected from a host of possible candidates, each one on the basis of his genuine contempt for this particular holiday. Gilsey had declared that he, personally, would support Christmas as soon as anybody he knew really gave Christianity a trial, but under the circumstances felt safe in taking out a life membership. So the new association was assembled, and held its first dinner on Christmas Eve, whereat plans for the next summer’s vacation were discussed. The dinner was followed the ensuing year by a second, and again by a third, for there had been no defections from the ranks. They seemed, indeed, matrimonially and Christmas-spiritually impregnable. December of the fourth year had come, and with it a snowstorm. Wallace Miller still lived in his littered apartment, down a side street, a little more prosperous than of old, but even more wedded to his habits.
He was digging in the bottom drawer of an old secretary one afternoon, hunting for a long-buried manuscript (after the fashion of authors), when he came upon a bundle of ancient souvenirs, dusty and forgotten. Dropping all other tasks, as one will when suddenly confronted by visible tokens of one’s past, he untied the parcel and began going through it. It was a motley collection--the program of his preparatory school Class Day exercises; the class prophecy he had read on that occasion, full of names many of which he could not now connect with the forgotten faces; a dance card, equally full of disembodied initials; a photograph of the old, square house amid its apple trees where he had lived as a boy, and which he tenderly laid aside; another photograph of a face between parted strands of heavy hair, a face once loved with the chivalric passion of seventeen. Wallace looked at this picture a long time, as the memories crowded back upon him, and laid it back with a wistful smile. Then he resumed his inspection of the package. Next came a blank book full of quotations copied in a boyish hand--and mostly sentimental--and another blank book labeled “story plots.” He remembered that one; it was compiled when he was “trying for” the preparatory school literary monthly. The plots were amusingly melodramatic. Below these books came souvenirs of still earlier years, which must have been saved by his mother--childish compositions, a letter he had written home when he went on his first visit without his parents, and finally a big Christmas card.
As he turned this card to the light, to see it better, a sudden wave of memories swept in over the threshold of his consciousness and he sat quite still while they had their way with him. The card, in color, depicted a small boy in a long nightie standing before a big fireplace with his hands stretched to the blaze. The warm red glow of the fire illumined his face and nightie. From the mantle hung a stocking. Behind him was a window, with small leaded panes, and through this window you saw a church roof, white with snow, and a cold moon riding high. Below the picture, in Old English type, were the words
Merry Christmas
Long, long ago, in the forgotten, dim years of childhood, he had loved that card. Once, he recalled, he had taken it to bed with him. The cold moonlight in contrast to the warm red fire had fascinated him, and the great, wallowing flames, and the jolly stocking. Dimly there came back to him the awareness of white roofs visible from his own window in the moonlight, of his own stocking hung up, of wallowing flames and his father’s big, hearty voice, and a Christmas tree in the morning, with a red sled under the branches and a star on the top.
He sat on the floor with the card in his lap, still and silent. Outside the snow was falling steadily. It was growing dim in the room. The steam pounded suddenly in the radiator. Wallace looked up angrily. The place was certainly gloomy, lonely, oppressive. He put the card hastily back into the package, slammed the drawer shut, and set off for his club, without lighting the lamps. Outside, the streets were already sloppy with the snow, and horses were falling down. Wallace vaguely recalled his boyhood delight in the first snow fall, his dash out into the drifts, upturning his face to meet the soft sting of the descending flakes. He turned his face up now, and snow went down his collar. He looked down again, and saw that the bottoms of his newly pressed trousers were getting draggled. Stepping off the curb into an apparently firm drift, he sank ankle deep in gutter slosh. He swore crossly to himself, as he stamped and shook the snow from his feet and garments and entered his club.
It was that hour preceding dinner when the club was full. Young men like himself were sitting in groups in the grill room, their hats tipped back on their heads, canes across their laps, highball glasses before them. He could hear confused scraps of their conversation--“... took a tumble today, all right. If it goes much lower it’ll wipe out my margins”; “--you bet, it’s some show, and that girl on ...”; “--no, you should have made it no trumps.” In corners men were absorbed in the asinine game of dominos. Wallace suddenly reflected that the amount of domino playing which goes on in New York clubs is a good argument for woman’s suffrage. Several men hailed him with the usual “What’s yours?” but he passed them by and went up to the squash courts. There, at least, men were getting exercise, he thought. The courts were full, so that he could not play. They smelled sweaty and stale. He went back downstairs, and found Smith and Stedman, just up from downtown, joining them in the inevitable cocktail.
“About time we began to plan our To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide feast, isn’t it?” Stedman asked. “I noticed today that all the shops were crowded, and a poor gink in our office showed me a ring he’s had to buy for his wife. The silly season is upon us.”
“I suppose it is,” said Wallace, suddenly reminded of their association. “Hope I sha’n’t be out of town for Christmas.”
“What’s that?” cried the others.
Wallace was rather surprised himself at his words, for he hadn’t the slightest intention till that moment of being out of town. But the card had made him unconsciously long for Christmas, for a real Christmas such as his childhood knew.
“I might be taking a trip soon,” he replied. “I’m a bit stale on the town.”
“Nonsense,” said Smith. “You’re the most confirmed New Yorker of the bunch. You’ll be here. Where on earth could you go?”
Wallace made no reply. He didn’t know where he could go, to find a welcome, and the thought somehow hurt him. They went out to the dining room and consumed the usual dinner, every item of which could be predicted. After dinner they went to the theatre, to a new musical comedy every song and dance and joke of which could be predicted with equal certainty. Then Wallace went home to his apartment, after the usual half hour at the club for a nightcap. It was cold and dismal in the apartment. “Also as usual,” he suddenly reflected. The next morning it was still dismal. Rather than work, he went out into the streets, through Madison Square which showed some traces of yesterday’s snow, and up the Avenue. The shops were gay. A toy store window attracted him. He saw many children going inside, with radiant faces of expectancy. One of them smiled at him.
“I’d like to give somebody something,” he suddenly thought. “It would seem rather nice.” He walked on. The pavements and walks were sloppy, but all faces were cheerful. Christmas seemed to be in the air. Wallace felt curiously aloof from the life about him, isolated, lonely. Why had he hated Christmas? Was it not, perhaps, just because he _was_ lonely, isolated? Was not the fault with him rather than Christmas? This was a disconcerting reflection. He put it away from him, and went to the club for lunch. Gilsey was there, holding forth “agin the government,” as the old phrase had it.
“Christmas!” he was saying. “Christmas is now degenerated into a season when most people have to study out how they can afford to give useless presents to all the people who have given useless presents to them. They can’t afford it, but they do it. Getting generous by calendar is almost as spontaneous as kissing your wife--if you’re so unfortunate as to have one--by the clock. It’s ...”
“It’s something rather nice, as I remember it,” Wallace interrupted.
“What?” roared Gilsey. “_Et tu?_ You’d better consult a doctor!”
“Gilsey,” the other answered, “did you ever try the band wagon instead of the scorner’s seat on the brownstone steps?”
Gilsey looked at his friend with a comical expression of quite genuine grief. “I--I don’t know what you mean, Wallie,” he said.
“Never mind,” said the other, contritely, “doubtless I don’t mean anything. I’ve been a bit upset by a memoir of my dead life, that’s all.”
But after lunch he returned to his apartment and took the memoir from the drawer again, looking tenderly at the little chap in the fire-lit nightie. “My dead life--yes,” he reflected, sentimentally touched by the memories. “That Christmas spirit of those days, can it not be found again? Is one foolishly seeking a lost Eden to search for it? Moonlight on a white world, a Christmas tree, the merry screams of children--of children--”
His reflections trailed off into incoherence, and chiefly he was aware of an oppressive sense of loneliness. The thought of his club bored him. Gilsey, with his eternal knocking, bored him, the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association struck him as rather a farce, not to say a pose. He wanted Christmas, that was the size of it. He wanted something he did not possess and in his present surroundings could not possess. He was living outside of Christmas.
“I’m a sort of a man without a country,” he suddenly thought. “Gilsey, Smith, Gleason--we all are. We are single men in New York. I’m going to find Christmas! I’m going to find moonlight on white roofs! I’m going to find that kid in the white nightie!”
He rose abruptly, and began to pack his bag and steamer trunk. He had no idea where he was going, but he was very cheerful. He felt like whistling, and found himself whistling a long-forgotten tune which his father had sung to him twenty years before. It was the ancient carol of Good King Wenceslaus.
That evening he did not go to the club to dine. The next morning, early, he was at the Grand Central Station, where he selected various time tables and hotel guides, and retired with them to the waiting room. He might have gone to the town of his birth and childhood, but for many reasons he did not care to. A trolley, he knew, ran past the big house where he had lived. Perhaps the house no longer stood there! The spawn of the city had by now reached the village; it would be no longer country, but suburb. He did not want a suburb. Neither did he desire to hazard enjoying Christmas in the shouts of children whose mother’s picture now reposed in his dusty drawer amid the souvenirs of his buried youth. So he ran through lists of stations till his eye chanced upon North Topsville, Massachusetts. The name pleased him. There was a South Topsville also, though Topsville itself did not exist so far as the railroad was concerned. South anything, he reflected, is usually the part of the community which has the mills and motion picture theatre--just why nobody has satisfactorily explained; so he cast his lot with North Topsville, and purchased a ticket for that place. An hour later he was sitting in a Pullman car and leaving New Rochelle behind.
By the time the train was well up into the New England hills, it had begun to snow again. Wallace looked out of the car window fascinated by the panorama of reddish gray hillsides seen through the white storm. As station after station was passed, each taking its quota of passengers from the train, each passenger met on the platform by welcoming friends or relatives, the Pullman began to be almost empty. Wallace felt lonely. There would be nobody to welcome _him_ at North Topsville. He felt rather sorry he had come when he reflected on this. After all, his search was probably hopeless. He ate luncheon, and became more cheerful, for the train was passing out of the storm into a glittering, white world of broad valleys and lovely hills and snug farmhouses on the roads between tidy New England villages where beautiful naked elms arched the streets. At South Topsville, sure enough, there was a big mill, and down the street from the station a motion picture theatre. Wallace grinned at the correctness of his intuition (“Almost feminine!” he thought), and began to put on his coat. The train ran into snowy meadows, into a strip of woodland and swamp, and then emerged into a gentle intervale where graceful vase elms fringed a stream, and came to a stop at the North Topsville station. Wallace alighted--the only passenger to do so--and the train moved on. He stood with his grip beside him and looked about. The station was a small one. Beyond it a road stretched across the meadow to the village street, where he saw a white steeple. On the other side of the tracks lay a snowy field, then a road with two or three farmhouses upon it, then the steep wall of a mountain. The station agent was up the platform examining his trunk. Beside the platform stood a pung of ancient vintage, and in it was seated a young man swinging his arms against his chest for warmth.
Wallace took a step toward him, and the youth nodded. “Be you goin’ ter the hotel?” he said.
“I am if there is one, and you are,” Wallace answered.
“I be ef you be,” the youth replied, “and there is. Hev ter come back agin fer the trunk,” he added. “Most folks as come here in winter is drummers, an’ they travel light--sample case an’ tooth brush an’ a copy of the Saturday Evenin’ Post. What’s your line?”
“Christmas,” Wallace answered with a laugh, as the pung moved across the meadows in the cold, crisp country air.
“Wall, I reckon now’s the time ter sell that,” the young man answered imperturbably. “Quite a brisk demand fer it these days. My little gel, she’s writ a letter ter Santa Claus thet’s goin’ ter nigh bust him, I reckon, him bein’ me.”
“Have you a little girl?” Wallace asked in surprise.
“Gol, I got two of ’em, but t’other’s only six months, and ain’t very good at spellin’ yet,” the driver replied. “Why not? I bin married more ’n five years. I’m twenty-six.”
Wallace made no reply. He was thirty himself, and felt curiously ashamed.
At the door of the Mansion House he gave the driver a dollar. “Keep the change--for the little girl,” he said. The other looked rather surprised, but finally put back his little bag of change into his pocket.
“Wall, seein’ yer put it thet way, I will,” he said. “But I don’t jest like it.”
“I _am_ a long way from New York!” thought Wallace, as he entered the hotel.
The Mansion House of North Topsville was a relic of past generations. Large Doric pillars in front gave it an air of dignified antiquity; but the interior was surprisingly neat and clean, though darkened by the protecting portico. That it should remain open during the winter months surprised Wallace at first, but he learned later that most of the business visitors to the South Topsville mills stayed here, attracted by the superior accommodations and a rather famous kitchen, while a certain number of health seekers could always be relied on. He signed the register, and was escorted to his room, a large, old-fashioned chamber with a broken pediment, like a highboy top, over the door, and an open fireplace. He ordered a fire laid at once, and began to unpack his bag. Outside, on the village street, he could hear sleighbells jingling, and presently the shouts of children going home from school. As soon as his trunk had come, he put on a woollen cap which pulled down over the ears (purchased the day before in New York), and hastened out of doors.
The village street was packed hard by the sleigh runners. There were half a dozen old-fashioned stores here in the town centre, a white church, a small stone library, a bank, a town hall. The town hall was built of brick, a simple rectangular block with white stone trimmings, and looked very cheerful over the snow. Out of the town centre, in either direction, the main street led beneath graceful arches of bare elm boughs into the white country. Wallace turned west, following a crowd of children with sleds and toboggans. For a quarter of a mile the street was lined with substantial old houses, several of them of considerable architectural beauty, and nearly all, apparently, surrounded in summer by lawns and gardens. North Topsville was evidently still a good specimen of a too rapidly disappearing type of aristocratic New England village. It seemed to the man as he walked along behind the children that he was less a stranger here than in New York. He felt as if he were coming back home. He walked with memories of his own childhood in such a town, and the intervening years faded from his consciousness. He half expected to meet somebody whom he should recognize, and once, indeed, seeing a girl’s figure coming down the path from a Doric porch behind guarding evergreens, his heart gave a startled bound, for it appeared to his excited imagination the figure of her whose picture he had so recently unearthed. Most people, probably, know that curious sensation of false recognition. If we have been thinking much of a person, we will often see him a score of times in a single day, ahead of us in the crowd, perhaps, or sitting across the theatre. At any rate, the shock of this sensation accounted for Wallace Miller’s pronounced stare at the girl’s face, when they met at her gate. Her eyes returned his gaze for a second, as if she, too, were appraising him, and then she passed quickly by, leaving behind on the keen winter air the faintest of perfumes, not the perfume which comes in bottles, but which comes from garments kept in lavender, from soap and health. The man drew a long breath, rather astonished at the acuteness of his nasal sense, long unused to subtler perfumes, and pleasurably warmed by the encounter. He looked sharply at the house from which the girl had come, to fix it in his memory. There were plants at several of the square, small-paned windows, and the tracks of a sled and toboggan all over the lawn. Behind it he could hear children screaming and laughing. He walked on more briskly.
The road soon passed into more open country, and to the right was a long, smooth field, ending in a hill slope. Field and slope were alive with sleds and children, their shouts making a shrill, ceaseless chorus, almost like spring frogs. The man climbed through the fence and ascended the slope, attracting a few curious glances from the coasters, and stood at the top watching the sport. He felt ridiculously shy. He wanted to coast, he wanted to join in the sport, but he did not know how to begin. Nobody spoke to him. There was a group of red-cheeked high school girls there, but his coming caused no flutter nor whispering among them, as he knew it would had he been younger. This made him feel uncomfortably and unreasonably old. The smaller boys were paying no attention to anybody except themselves. The smaller girls were timidly coasting on a gentler incline of their own, and doing a great deal of the screaming. Two busy small boys were industriously hauling up a big toboggan, and bumping down on it over the runner tracks, hard put to keep it from swerving and upsetting them. Presently two other toboggans appeared, and had the same difficulty on the smooth, uncharted hillside.