Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

Human

Human––––––––

Pretty soon the new-old Christmas will be here. I donno but it’s here now. Here in the village we’ve give out time and again that our Christmas isn’t going to be just trading (not many of us can call it “shopping” yet without stopping to think, any more than we can say “maid” for hired girl, real easy) and just an exchange of useless gifts. So in the “new” way, little by little the old Christmas is being uncovered from under the store-keepers’ Christmas. Till at last we shall have the Christmas of the child in the manger and not of the three kings.

And then we’re going to look back on the romance that Christmas had through the long time when meanings have measured themselves commercial. Just as we look back now on the romance of chivalry. And we’ll remember all the kindness and the humor of the time that’ll be outgrown—even though we wouldn’t have the time come back when we looked for Christmas in things—things—things ... and sometimes found it there.

The week before Christmas, the Friendship Village post-office, near closing, is regular Bedlam. We all stand in line, with our presents done up, while the man at the window weighs everybody else’s, and we almost drop in our tracks. And our manners, times like this, is that we never get out of our place for no one. Not for no one! Only—once we did.

Two nights before Christmas that year I got my next-to-the-last three packages ready and stepped into the post-office with ’em about half-past seven. And at the post-office door I met Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss. She had a work-bag and a shopping-bag and a suit-case, all of ’em bulging full.

“My land!” I says, “you ain’t going to mail all them?”

“I am, too,” she says, “and I’m that thankful I’m through, and my back aches that hard, I could cry. Twenty-one,” she says, grim, “twenty-one presents I’ve got made out of thought and elbow work, and mighty little money, all ready to mail on time. Now,” says she, “I can breathe.”

“Kin I carry your satchel, Mis’ Holcomb?” says somebody.

We looked down, and there’s little Stubby Mosher, that’s seven, and not much else to say about him. He ain’t no father, nor not much of any brother, except a no-account one in the city; and his mother has just been sent to the Wooster Hospital by the Cemetery Improvement Sodality that is extending our work to include the sick. We’d persuaded her to go there by Stubby’s brother promising to send him to spend Christmas with her. And we were all feeling real tender toward Stubby, because we’d just heard that week that she wasn’t going to get well.

“Well, Stubby,” says Mis’ Holcomb, kind, “yes, I’ll be obliged for a lift, if not a lug. You well?” she asks.

“Yes’m,” says Stubby, acting green, like a boy will when you ask after his health.

He picked up her suit-case and moved over toward the line. It was an awful long line that night, that reached ’way around past the public desk. In ahead of us was ’most everybody we knew—Abigail Arnold and Mis’ Merriman and Libby Liberty and old rich Mis’ Wiswell with a bag of packages looking like they might be jewelry, every one. And every one of them was talking as hard as they could about the Christmas things they couldn’t get done.

“Might as well settle down for a good visit while we’re waiting,” I says to Mis’ Holcomb, and she made her eyebrows sympathize.

No sooner was we stood up, neat and in line, than in come three folks that was total strangers to me and to the village as well. One was a young girl around twenty, with eyes kind of laughing at everything, dressed in blue, with ermine on her hat and an ermine muff as big as one of my spare-room pillows, and three big fresh pink roses on her coat. And one was a youngish fellow, some older than her, in a gray cap, and having no use of his eyes—being they were kept right close on the lady in blue. And the other, I judged, was her father—a nice, jolly, private Santa Claus, in a fur-lined coat. They were in a tearing hurry to get to the general-delivery window, but when they saw the line, and how there was only one window for mail and stamps and all, they fell in behind us, as nice as we was ourselves.

“Let me take you out and you wait in the car, Alison,” says the youngish man, anxious.

“Hadn’t you better, dear?” says her father, careful.

“Why, but I love this!” she says. “Isn’t it quaint?” And she laughed again.

Now, I hate that word quaint. So does Mis’ Holcomb. It always sounds to us like last year’s styles. So though her and I had been looking at the three strangers—that we saw were merely passing through in an automobile, like the whole country seems to—with some interest, we both turned our backs and went on visiting and listening to the rest.

“I’ve got three more to get presents for,” says Mis’ Merriman in that before-Christmas conversation that everybody takes a hand at, “and what to get them I do not know. Don’t you ever get up a stump about presents?”

“Stump!” says Libby Liberty, “I live on a stump from the time I start till I stick on the last stamp.”

“I’ve got two more on my list,” Mis’ Wiswell says, worried, “and it don’t seem as if I could take another stitch nor buy another spoon, hat-pin or paper-knife. But I know they’ll send me something, both of them.”

I stood looking at us, tired to death with what we’d been a-making, but sending ’em off with a real lot of love and satisfaction wrapped up in ’em, too. And I thought how we covered up Christmas so deep with work that we hardly ever had time to get at the real Christmas down underneath all the stitches. And yet, there we were, having dropped everything else that we were doing, just because it was Christmas week, and coming from all over town with little things we had made, and standing there in line to send em off to folks. And I thought of all the other folks in all the other post-offices in the world, doing the self-same thing that night. And I felt all kind of nice and glowing to think I was one of ’em. Only I did begin to wish we were enough civilized to get the glow some other way.

“I guess it’s going to take a long time,” says Mis’ Holcomb, patient. “Stubby, you needn’t wait if you’ve anything else to do.”

“Oh,” says Stubby, important, “I’ve got a present to mail.”

A present to mail! When Sodality had been feeding him for five weeks among us!

Mis’ Holcomb and I exchanged our next two glances.

“What is it, Stubby?” asks Mis’ Holcomb, that is some direct by nature and never denies herself at it.

He looked up kind of shy—he’s a nice little boy, when anybody has any time to pay any attention to him.

“It’s just this,” he said, and took it out from under his coat. It was about as big as a candy box, and he’d wrapped it up himself, and the string was so loose and the paper was so tore that they weren’t going to stay by each other past two stations.

“Mercy!” says Mis’ Holcomb, “leave me tie it up for you.”

She took it. And in order to tie it she had to untie it. And when she done that, what was in it come all untied. And she see, and we both of us see, what was in it. It was a great big pink rose, fresh and real, with a lot of soaking wet paper wrapped round the stem.

“Stubby Mosher!” says Mis’ Holcomb straight out, “where’d you get this?”

He colored up. “I bought it to the greenhouse,” he says. “I’m a-goin’ to shovel paths till the first of March to pay for it. And they gimme one path ahead for postage.”

“Who you sending it to?” says Mis’ Holcomb, blunt—and I kind of wished she wouldn’t, because the folks right round us was beginning to listen.

“To mother,” says Stubby.

Mis’ Holcomb near dropped the box. “My land!” she said, “why didn’t you take it to her? You’re goin’ to-morrow to spend Christmas with her, ain’t you?”

Stubby shook his head and swallowed some.

“I ain’t going,” he told her.

“Ain’t going!” Mis’ Holcomb says. “Why ain’t you goin’, I’d like to know, when you was promised?”

“My brother wrote he can’t,” said Stubby. “He’s had some money to pay. He can’t send me. I——”

He stopped, and looked down on the floor as hard as ever he could, and swallowed like lightning.

“Well, but that’s how we got her to go there,” Mis’ Holcomb says. “We promised her you’d come.”

“My brother wrote he can’t.” Stubby said it over.

Mis’ Holcomb looked at me for just one minute. Then her thoughts took shape in her head, and out.

“How much money has Sodality got in the treasury?” she says to me.

“Forty-six cents,” says I, that’s treasurer and drove to death for a fund for us.

“How much is the fare to Wooster?”

“Three fifty-five each way,” says Stubby, ready, but hopeless.

“My land!” says Mis’ Holcomb, “they ain’t a woman in Sodality that can afford the seven dollars—nor a man in the town’ll see it like we do. And no time to raise nothing. And that poor woman off there....”

She stared out over the crowd, kind of wild.

The line was edging along up to the window, and still talking about it.

“...Elsie and Mame that I haven’t sent a thing to,” Mis’ Merriman was saying. “I just must get out and find something to-morrow, if it does get there late. But I’m sure I donno what....”

“...disappointed me last minute on two Irish crochet collars,” Mis’ Wiswell was holding forth, in her voice that talks like her vocal cords had gone flat, same as car-wheels.

“I’ve got company coming to-morrow, and I just simply will have to let both presents go, if I stay awake all night about it, as stay awake I s’pose I shall.”

Mis’ Holcomb looked over at me steady for a minute, like she’d see a thing she couldn’t name. Then she kind of give it up, and went on tying Stubby’s package. And just then she see what he’d wrote for a Christmas card. It was on a piece of wrapping-paper, and it said:

TO MY MOTHER

I CANT COM

MERY CRISMAS

STUB

“Merry Christmas!” Mis’ Holcomb says over like she hadn’t any strength. Then all of a sudden she stood up.

“Stubby,” she says, “you run out a minute, will you? You run over to the grocery and wait for me there a minute—quick. I’ll see to your package.”

He went when she said that.

And swift as a flash, before I could think at all what she meant, Mis’ Holcomb laid Stubby’s present down by her suit-case, and wheeled around and whipped two packages out of her shopping-bag, and faced the line of Friendship Village folks drawn up there to the window, taking their turns.

“Everybody!” she says, loud enough so’s they all heard her, “I’ve got more Christmas presents than I need. I’ll auction off some of ’em—all hand-made—to anybody that’s short of presents. I’ll show ’em to you. Come here and look at ’em, and make a bid.”

They looked at her for a minute, perfectly blank; and she was beginning to undo one of ’em.... And then all of a sudden I see her plan, what it was; and I walked right over beside of her.

“Don’t you leave her undo ’em!” I calls out. “It’s for Stubby Mosher,” I says, “that can’t go, after all, to his mother in the Wooster Hospital, that’s going to die—count of his brother not sending him the money. She can’t get well—we know that since last week. They’s only forty-six cents in Sodality treasury. Let’s us buy Mis’ Holcomb’s presents that she’s made and is willing to auction off! Unsight-unseen let us buy ’em! I bid fifty cents.”

The line had kind of wavered and broke, and was looking away from itself towards us. The man at the window had stopped weighing and had his head close up, looking out.

Everybody was hushed dumb for a minute. Then it kind of got to Mis’ Wiswell—that’s had so much trouble that things ’most always get to her easy—and she says out:

“Oh, land! Is it? Why, I bid seventy-five then.”

“Eighty!” says I, reckless, to egg her on.

Then Libby Liberty kind of come to, and bid ninety, though everybody knew the most she has is egg-money—and finally it, whatever it was, went to Mis’ Wiswell for a dollar.

“Is it a present would do for ladies?” she says, when she made her final bid. “I donno, though, as that matters. One dollar!”

Well, then Mis’ Holcomb up with another present, and Mis’ Merriman started that one, and though dazed a little yet—some folks daze so terrible easy if you go off an inch from their stamping-ground!—the rest of us, including Abigail Arnold that hadn’t ought ton have bid at all, got that one up to another dollar, and it went to Mis’ Merriman for that. But the next package stuck at fifty cents—not from lack of willingness, I know, but from sheer lack of ways—and it was just going at that when I whispered to Mis’ Holcomb:

“What’s in this one?”

“Towel with crochet work set in each end and no initial,” she says.

“Really?” says a voice behind me.

And there was the young lady in blue, with the ermine and the roses. And I see all of a sudden that she didn’t look to be laughing at us at all, but her eyes were bright, and she was kind of flushed up, and it come to me that she would have bidded before, only she was sort of watching us—mebbe because she thought we were quaint. But I didn’t have time to bother with that thought much, not then.

“I’ll give two dollars for that,” she says.

“Done!” says Mis’ Holcomb, real auctioneer-like, and with her cheeks red, and her hat on one ear, and her hand going up and down. “Now this one—who’ll bid on this one?” says she, putting up another. “How much for this? How much——”

“How much is the fare to where he’s going?” says somebody else strange, and there was the youngish fellow speaking, that was with her with the roses.

“Seven-ten round trip to Wooster,” says Mis’ Holcomb, instant.

“Why, then, I bid three-ten for whatever you have there,” he says laughing.

But Mis’ Holcomb, instead of flaming up because now the whole money for Stubby’s fare was raised, just stood there looking at that youngish man, mournful all over her face.

“It’s a hand-embroidered dressing-sack,” she says melancholy. “You don’t never want that!”

“Yes—yes, I do,” he says, still laughing, “yes, I do. It’s a straight bid.”

“Oh, my land!” says Mis’ Holcomb, her voice slipping, “then we’ve got it. We’ve got it all right here!”

But while she was a-saying it, a big, deep voice boomed out all over her and the rest that was exclaiming.

“Ticket to where?” says the private-Santa-Claus-looking man in the fur coat.

“Wooster, this state,” says I, being Mis’ Holcomb was almost speechless.

“Well, now,” says the private Santa Claus, “don’t we go pretty close to Wooster? Where’s that map we wore out? Well, I know we go pretty close to Wooster. Why can’t we take your Master Stubby to Wooster in the car? We’re going on to-night—if we ever get to that general-delivery window,” he ends in a growl.

And that was the time the line made way—the line that never moves for no one. And the Santa Claus man went up and got his mail.

And while he was a-doing it, I run out after Stubby, setting on a barrel in the grocery, happy with three cranberries they’d give him. And as I come back in the door with him, I see Mis’ Holcomb just showing his rose to the young lady with the ermine and the roses. And then I see for sure by the young lady’s eyes that she wasn’t the way I’d thought she was—laughing at us. Why, her eyes were as soft and understanding as if she didn’t have a cent to her name. And I donno but more so.

“Oh, father,” I heard her say, “I’m glad we came in for the mail ourselves! What if we hadn’t?”

And I concluded I didn’t mind that word quaint half as much as I thought I did.

Every last one of the line went out of the post-office to see Stubby off, and the man at the window, he came too. They had a big warm coat they put the little boy into, and we wrapped up his rose and put that in the car, so’s it would get there sooner and save the postage, same time, and they tucked him away as snug as a bug in a rug, his little face just shining out for joy.

“Oh, and you can buy your presents back now,” says Libby Liberty to Mis’ Holcomb right in the middle of it.

“No, sir,” says Mis’ Holcomb, proud. “A bargain is a bargain, and I made mine.” And then she thought of something. “Oh,” she says, leaning forward to the window of the car, “don’t you want to sell your presents back again?”

“No!” they all told her together. “We made a straight bid, you know.”

“Then,” says Mis’ Holcomb, “let’s us give Stubby the money to put in his pocket and take the one-way fare to his mother!”

And that was what they done. And the big car rolled off down Daphne Street, with Stubby in it going like a king.

And when we all got back in the post-office, what do you s’pose? There was the crocheted towel and the hand-embroidered dressing-sack slipped back all safe into Mis’ Holcomb’s shopping-bag!

But she wouldn’t take the other things back—she would not, no matter what Mis’ Wiswell and Mis’ Merriman said.

“I can crochet a couple of things to-morrow like lightning,” says Mis’ Holcomb. “You don’t want me to be done out of my share in Stubby’s Christmas, do you?” she asks ’em.

And we all stood there, talking and laughing and going over it and clean forgetting all about the United States mails, till the man at the window called out:

“ ‘Leven minutes and a quarter before the mail closes!”

We all started back to the window, but nobody could remember just exactly where anybody was standing before, and they all wanted everybody to go up first and step in ahead of them. And the line, instead of being a line with some of ’em ahead of others and all trying to hurry, was just a little group, with each giving everybody their turn, peaceful and good-willing. And all of a sudden it was like Christmas had come, up through all the work and the stitches, and was right there in the Friendship Village post-office with us.

“Goodness!” says Mis’ Holcomb in my ear, “I was wore to the bone getting ready my Christmas things. But now I’m real rested.”

“So am I,” I says.

And so was every one of us, I know, falling back into line there by the window. All rested, and not feeling hurried nor nothing: only human.