Zona Gale

“ Through all the tumult of the time, Christmas Week and the time that lies near to it is always waiting to claim its own, to take to itself those who will not be deceived, who see in the stupendous yearly pageant only the usual spectacle of humanity trying to say divine things in terms of things physical, because the time for the universal expression is not yet come. ”

“ These filled her on the road which she took to meet him—and took alone, for she would have no one go with her. ("What's come over Mary?" they asked one another in the kitchen. "She acts like she was somebody else and herself too.") The night lay about her as any other winter night, white and black,—a clean white world on which men set a pattern of highway and shelter, a clean dark sky on which a story is written in stars; and between—no mystery, but only growth. Out toward the drawbridge the road was not well broken. ”

“ Whole areas of every town lay, perforce, within the days of Christmas Week—it must have been so, for there is only one calendar to embrace humanity, as there is only one way of birth and breath and death, one source of tears, one functioning for laughter. ”

“ Winter affords nothing save disclosure. In the uncompromising cleanness of that wash of Winter light, Ebenezer Rule was himself, for anybody to see. Looking like countless other men, lean, alert, preoccupied, his tall figure stooped, his smooth, pale face like a photograph too much retouched, this commonplace man took his place in the day almost as one of its externals. With that glorious pioneer trio, mineral, vegetable and animal; and with intellect, that worthy tool, he did his day's work. His face was one that had never asked itself, say, of a Winter morning: What else? ”

“ To all these in the towns Christmas Week came. And of them all not many stood silent and looked Christmas Week in the face. Yet it is a human experience that none is meant to die without sharing. For the season is the symbol of what happens to folk if they claim it.
Christmas is the time of withdrawal of most144 material life. It is the time when nature subtracts the externals, hides from man the phenomena of even her evident processes. Left alone, his thought turns inward and outward—which is to say, it lays hold upon the flowing force so slightly externalized in himself. ”

“ Abel's candle, and the arc light shining like cold blue crystal before the dark Town Hall, and the post-office light where the dog-eared list hung and the telegraph key clicked out its pretence at hand touching with all the world, these were the only lights the street showed—save Capella, that went beside her and, as she looked, seemed almost to stand above the town. ”

“ At his gate in the street wall lined with snow-bowed lilacs and mulberries, Ebenezer Rule waited in the dark for his two friends to come back. He had found Kate Kerr in his kitchen methodically making a jar of Christmas cookies. ("You've got to eat, if it is Christmas," she had defended herself in a whisper.) And to her stupefaction he had dispatched her to Mary Chavah's with her entire Christmas baking in a basket. ”

“ Mis' Bates looked scandalized. "That's nonsense," she said sharply, "and it's sacrilegious besides. When God means a thing to happen, there's not a thing to do. What about earthquakes and—and cancers?"
"I don't believe he ever means earthquakes and cancers," said Mis' Winslow, to her overshoes.
"Prevent 'em, then!" challenged Mis' Bates, triumphantly.
Mis' Winslow looked up. Her eyes were shining as they had shone sometimes when one of her seven-under-fifteen had given its first sign of consciousness of more than self. ”

“ But it's such a nice night I'm going to walk around."
"Things are going to go your way to that meeting, I guess," said Simeon; "ain't you always found fault with Christmas?"
"They's a lot o' nonsense about it," Mary assented; "I don't ever bother myself much with it. Why?"
"I donno but we'll all come round to your way of thinking to-night," said Simeon.
"For just this year!" Abel Ames called back, as they went on.
"You can't do much else, I guess," said Mary. "Everybody dips Christmas up out of their pocketbooks, and if there ain't nothing there, they can't dip." ”

“ Through all the curious variations which it receives at our hands, something shines and sings: self-giving, joy giving, a vast, dim upflickering on humanity of what this thing really is that it seeks to observe, this thing that grips men so that no matter what they are about, they will drop it at the touch of the gong and turn to some expression, however crooked and thwarted, of the real spirit of the time. ”

“ A flag is always kind of tasty, don't you think?"
"Oh, it's harmless," Ebenezer said, "harmless."
"No hustling business," Simeon pursued, "can be contented with just not doing something. It ain't enough not to have no Christmas. You've got to find something that'll express nothing, and express it forcible. In business, a minus sign," said Simeon, "is as good as a plus, if you can keep it whirling round and round." ”

“ If he finds in his own being a thousand obstructions, a thousand persons,—dogs, sorcerers, whoremongers,—he will try to escape from them all, back to the externals. But if he finds there a channel which the substance of being is using, he will be no stranger, but a familiar, with himself. Only when the channel has been long cleared, when there has left it all consciousness of striving, of self in any form, only when he finds himself empty, ready, immaculate, will he have the divine adventure. ”

“ Ellen said, "and I'm not wore out with the things I want to do."
"Hey, king and country!" the old man cried, upsetting the popper. "Don't get a child around here underfoot. I'm too old. I deserve grown folks. My head hurts me—"
"Matthew," said Ellen to her husband, "let Helders bring us one. To-morrow—for Christmas, Mat!"
Matthew looked slowly from side to side. It seemed incredible that so large a decision should lie with a man so ineffectual. ”

“ Illustrations CHRISTMAS
1 I
It was in October that Mary Chavah burned over the grass of her lawn, and the flame ran free across the place where in Spring her wild flower bed was made. Two weeks later she had there a great patch of purple violets. And all Old Trail Town, which takes account of its neighbours' flowers, of the migratory birds, of eclipses, and the like, came to see the wonder.
"Mary Chavah!" said most of the village, "you're the luckiest woman alive. ”

“ Abel called.
Ebenezer stopped on the crossing.
"What for?" he asked.
"Man alive," said Abel, "don't you know Bruce has got a little girl?"
"No," said Ebenezer, "I—didn't know. I'm obliged to you."
He turned from them, but instead of crossing the street to go to his house, he faced down the little dark street to the factory. He had walked past Jenny's once that evening, but without being able to force himself to inquire. He knew that Bruce had come a day or two before, but Bruce had sent him no word. ”

“ The owl paper, the puppy washbasin, the huge calendar with its picture of a stag, the shelves for whatever things of his own he had, all pleased her newly. She had laid on his table her grandfather's Bible with pictures of Asiatic places. Below his mirror hung his father's photograph, that young face, with the unspeakable wistfulness of youth, looking somewhere outside the picture. It made her think of the passionate expectation in the face of the picture that Jenny had brought.
"Young folks in pictures always look like they was setting store by something that ain't true yet," Mary thought. ”

“ The time did not seem momentous. It was only very quiet. Nothing new was there, nothing different. It had always been so. The night lay in a sovereign consciousness of being more than just itself. "Do you think239 that you are all just you and nothing else?" it was seen to be compassionately asking.
"What else?" Ebenezer asked himself.
He did not face this yet. But in that hour which seemed pure essence, with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward Jenny's house.
Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where, in the dark, the tree stood. ”

“ If a miracle was bound to happen, it'd get itself happened to you."
"I don't believe in miracles, though," Mary wrote to Jenny Wing. "These come just natural—only we don't know how."2
"That is miracles," Jenny wrote back. "They do come natural—we don't know how."
"At this rate," said Ellen Bourne, one of Mary's neighbours, "you'll be having roses bloom in your yard about Christmas time. For a Christmas present."
"I don't believe in Christmas," Mary said. "I thought you knew that. But I'll take the roses, though, if they come in the Winter," she added, with her queer flash of smile. ”

“ When that time comes ... when the time of the worship of things shall be past; when the tribal sense of holiday shall have given place149 to the family sense, and that family shall be mankind; when shall never be seen the anomaly of celebrating in a glorification of little family tables—whose crumbs fall to those without—the birth of him who preached brotherhood; and the mockery of observing with wanton spending the birth of him who had not where to lay his head; when the rudiments of divine perception, of self-perception, of social perception, shall have grown to their next estate ”

“ While the man, Affer by name, laboriously looked it up,—covering incredible little dirty figures with an incredibly big dirty forefinger,—Mary stood staring at the list of names tacked below the dog-eared Christmas Notice. She remembered that she had not yet signed it herself. She asked for a pencil—causing confusion to the little figures and delay to the big finger—and, while she waited, wrote her name. "A good, sensible move," she thought, as she signed. ”

“ Mary said listlessly. "It's an awful responsibility, ain't it—taking a child so?"
Mis' Winslow's face abruptly rejected its own anxious lines and let the eyes speak for it.
"I always think children is like air," she said; "you never realize how hard they're pressing down on you—but you do know you can't live without them." ”

“ There seems to be no established etiquette of revolutions. But something of the unconsciousness of the enthusiast was upon Mis' Mortimer Bates, and she spoke before she knew:—
"So's we can be sure everybody else'll know it and not give something either and be disappointed32 too," she assented. "Well, I bet everybody'd be real relieved."
"The churches has sanctioned us doing away with Christmas this year by doing away with it themselves," observed Mis' Jane Moran. "That'd ought to be enough to go by." ”

“ Abel nodded gravely. All Old Trail Town knew that, and honoured Bruce for it.
"Headstrong couple," Ebenezer added. "So Jenny's bent on having Christmas, no matter what the town decides, is she?" he added, "it's like her, the minx."
"I don't think it was planned that way," Abel said simply; "she's only buying white goods," he repeated. And, Ebenezer still staring, "Surely you know what Jenny's come home for?" Abel said.
A moment or two later Ebenezer was out on the street again, his face turned toward the factory. ”

“ Yet, besides Mary Chavah and Ebenezer Rule, probably the only person in the town whose satisfaction in the project could be counted on to be unfeigned was little Tab Winslow. For Tab, as all the town knew, had a turkey brought up by his own hand to be the Winslows' Christmas dinner, but such had become Tab's intimacy with and fondness for the turkey that he was prepared to forego his Christmas if only that dinner were foregone, too.23
"Theophilus Thistledown is such a human turkey," Tab had been heard explaining patiently; "he knows me—and he knows his name. ”

“ Jenny said, as she turned. Then, as she made ready to go, she broke off and smote her hands together.
"Oh," she said, "it don't seem as if I could bear it not to have Christmas—not this year."57
"You mean your and Bruce's first Christmas," said Mary. "Mark my words, he'll be glad to be rid of the fuss. Men always are. Come on out the front door if you're going," said Mary. "You might as well use it when it's open."
As Jenny passed the open parlour door, she looked in again at the bare room. ”

“ Mis' Bates's forehead took alarm—the alarm of the sympathetic hearer who is challenged to be doer.
"Do?" she repeated. "You can't go back on the paper at this late day. And you can't give him a Christmas and every other of our children not have any just because we're their parents and still living. There ain't a thing to do."130
Mis' Winslow's eyes were still on her overshoes. "I don't believe there's never 'not a thing' to do," she said, "I don't believe it." ”

“ He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down the road to Ellen Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to informalities. ”

“ Ellen said, "you ask her if I can't do anything to help."
Later in the day, happening in at Mis' Mortimer Bates's, Mis' Winslow found Mis' Moran there before her, and asked what they had heard "about Mary Chavah." Something in that word "about" pricks curiosity its sharpest. "Have you heard about Mary Chavah?" "It's too bad about Mary Chavah." "Isn't it queer about Mary Chavah?"—each120 of these is like setting flame to an edge of tissue. Omit "about" from the language, and you abate most gossip. At Mis' Winslow's phrase, both women's eyebrows curved to another arc. ”