TIME-SPIRIT AND ETERNAL SPIRIT

A hurried whispering began among the children, and the result was quickly announced:—

"We should like to ask you some questions." Evidently the intention was that questions should riddle him—make reasonable daylight shine through his mysterious pretensions: on the stage of his own theatre he was to be stripped.

"I treat all children alike," he replied with immediate insistence on his divine rights. "And if any could ask, all should ask. But suppose every living child asked me a question. That would be at least a million to every hair on my head: don't you think that would make any head a little heavy? Besides, I've always gotten along so well all over the world because I have done what I had to do and have never stopped to talk. As soon as you begin to talk, don't you get into trouble—with somebody? Who has ever forced a word out of me!"

How alert he was, nimble, brisk, alive! A marvellous kind of mental arctic light from him began to spread through the pitchiness of the room as from a sun hidden below the horizon.

"But everything seems going to pieces tonight," he continued; "and maybe I might let my silence go to pieces also. Your request is granted—but—remember, one question apiece—the first each thinks of—and not quarrelsome: this is no night for quarrelsome questions!"

The lot of asking the first fell naturally to Elsie, and her question had her history back of it; the question of each had life-history.

When Elsie first came to know about the mysterious Gift-bringer from the North, she promptly noticed in her sharp way that he was already old; nor thereafter did he grow older. She found pictures of him taken generations before she was born—and there he was just as old! She judged him to be about fifty-five years or sixty as compared with middle-aged Kentucky farmers, some of whom were heavy-set men like him with florid complexions, and with snow on their beards and hair, and mischievous eyes and the same high spirits. Only, there was one who had no spirits at all except the very lowest. This was a deacon of the country church, who instead of giving presents to the children once a year pushed a long-handled box at them every Sunday and tried to force them to make presents to him! One hot morning of early summer—he had so annoyed her—when the box again paused tantalizingly in front of her, she had shot out a plump little hand and dropped into it a frantic indignant June bug which presently raised a hymn for the whole congregation. She hated the deacon furthermore because he resembled Santa Claus, and she disliked Santa Claus because he resembled the deacon: she held them responsible for resembling each other. All this was long ago in her short life, but the ancient grudge was still lodged in her mind, and it now came out in her question:—

"Why did you wait to get old before you began to bring presents to children; why didn't you bestir yourself earlier; and what were you doing all the years when you were young?"

If you could have believed that trees laughed, you would have said that the Christmas Fir was laughing now.

"That is a very good question, but it is not very simple, I am sorry to say; and by my word I am bound not to answer it; you were told that the question must be simple! However, I am willing to make you a promise: I do not know where I may be next year, but wherever you are, you will receive, I hope, a little book called Santa Claus in the Days of his Youth. I hope you will find your question answered there to your satisfaction. And now—for the next."

During the years of Elizabeth's belief in the great Legend of the North, second to her delight in the coming of the gifts was sorrow at the going of them. Every year an avalanche of beautiful things flowed downward over the world, across mountain ranges, across valleys and rivers; and each house chimney received its share from the one vast avalanche. Every year! And for all she knew these avalanches had been in motion thousands of years. But where were the gifts? Gone, melted away; so that there were now no more at the end of time than there had been at the beginning. The fate of the vanished lay tenderly over the landscape of the world for her.

"You say that one night of every winter you drive round the earth in your sleigh, carrying presents. Every summer don't you disguise yourself and drive over the same track in an old cart and gather them up again? Many a summer day I have watched you without your knowing it!"

This time you could have believed that if evergreens are sensitive, the fir now stood with its boughs lowered a little pensively and very still.

"I am sorry! The question violates the same mischief-making rule, and by my word I am bound not to answer it. But it is as easy to give a promise to two as to one; next year I hope you will receive a little book called Santa Claus with the Wounded and the Lost. And I wish you joy in that story. Now then!"

"Father told me not to ask any questions while I was over here: to wait and ask him."

The little theatre of make-believe almost crumbled to its foundations beneath that one touch of reality! The great personage of the drama lost control of his resources for a moment. Then the little miracle-play was successfully resumed:—

"Well, then, I won't have to answer any questions for you!"

"But I can tell you what I was going to ask! I was going to ask you if you are married. And if you are, why you travel always without your wife. I was wondering whether you didn't like your wife!"

The answer came like a blinding flash—like a flash meant to extinguish another flash:—

"A book, a book! Another book! There will have to be another book! Look out for one next Christmas, dropped down the chimney especially for you: and I hope it won't fall into the fire or into the soot—Santa Claus and his Wife. Now then—time flies!"

During the infantile years when the heir of the house had been a believer in the figure beside the Tree, there had always been one point he jealously weighed: whether children of white complexion were not entitled to a larger share of Christmas bounty than those of red or yellow or brown or black faces; and in particular whether among all white children those native to the United States ought not to receive highest consideration. The old question now rang out:

"What do you think of the immigrants?"

The Tree did not exactly laugh aloud, but it certainly laughed all over—with hearty wholesome approving laughter.

"That question is the worst offender of all; it is quarrelsome! It is the most quarrelsome question that could be asked. What are immigrants to me? But next year look out for a book called Santa Claus on Immigrants."

"Put plenty of gore in it!"

"Gore! Gore on Christmas Eve! But if there was gore, since it is in a book, it would have to be dry gore. But wouldn't salve be better—salve for old wounds?"

"If you're going to put salve in, you might use my Waterloo salve!"

"Don't be peculiar, Herbert—especially away from home!"

Certainly the Tree was shaken with laughter this time.

"See what things grow to when once started; here were four questions, and now they fill four books. But time flies. Now I must make haste! My reindeer!—"

His ingenuity was evidently at work upon this pretext as perhaps furnishing him later on a way through which he might effect his escape: in this little theatre of thin illusion there must be some rear exit; and through this he hoped to retire from the stage without losing his dignity and the illusion of his rÔle.

"My reindeer," he insisted, holding fast to that clew for whatsoever it might lead him to, "if they should rush by for me, I must be ready. A faint distant signal—and I'm gone! So before I go, in return for your questions I am going to ask you one. But first there is a little story—my last story; and I beg you to listen to it."

After a pause he began:—

"Listen, you children! You children of this house, you children of the world!

"You love the snow. You play in it, you hunt in it; it brings the melody of sleigh-bells, it gives white wings to the trees and new robes to the earth. Whenever it falls on the roof of this house and in the yard and upon the farm, sooner or later it vanishes; it is forever rising and falling, forming and melting—on and on through the ages.

"If you should start from your home to-night and travel northward, after a while you would find everything steadily changing: the atmosphere growing colder, living creatures beginning to be left behind, those that remain beginning to look white, the voices of the earth beginning to die out: color fading, song failing. As you journeyed on always you would be travelling toward the silent, the white, the dead. And at last you would come to a land of no sun and of all silence except the noise of wind and ice; you would have entered the kingdom of eternal snow.

"If from your home you should start southward, as you crossed land after land in the same way, you would begin to see that life was failing and the harmonies of the planet replaced by the discord of lifeless forces—storming, crushing, grinding. And at last you would reach the threshold of another world that you dared not enter and that nothing alive ever faces: the home of perpetual frost.

"If you should rise straight into the air from your housetop as though you were climbing the side of a mountain, you would find at last that you had ascended to a height where the mountain would be capped forever with snow. For all round the earth wherever its mountains are high enough, their summits are capped with the one same snow: above us all everywhere lies the upper land of eternal cold.

"Sometime in the future—we do not know when—the spirit of cold at the north will move southward; the spirit of cold at the south will move northward; the spirit of cold in the upper air will move downward; and the three will meet, and for the earth there will be one whiteness and silence—rest.

"Little children, the earth is burning out like a bedroom candle. The great sun is but a longer candle that burns out also. All the stars are but candles that one by one go out in the darkness of the universe. Now tell me, you children of this house, you children of the earth, for I make no difference among you and ask each the same question: when the earth and the sun and the stars are burnt out like your bedroom candles, where in that darkness will you be? Where will all the children of the earth be then?"

And now at last the Great Solemn Night drew apart its curtains of mystery and revealed its spiritual summit.

Out of these ordinary American children had all but died the last vestiges of the superstitions of their time and of earlier ages. They were new children of a new land in a new time; and they were the voices of fresh millions—voices that rose and floated far and wide as a revelation of the spirit of man stripped of worn-out rags and standing forth in its divine nakedness—wingÈd and immortal.

"I know where I shall be," said the lad whose ideal of this life turned toward strength that would not fail and truth that could not waver.

"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose earthly ideal was selfishness: who had within herself humanity's ideal that hereafter somewhere in the universe all desires will be gratified.

"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose earthly ideal was the quieting of the world's pain: who had vague notions of a land where none would be sick and none suffer.

"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose ideal of life was the gathering and keeping of all beautiful things that none should be lost and that none should change.

Then in the same spirit in which the group of them had carried on their drama of the night they now asked him:—

"Where will you be?"

For a while there was no answer, and when at length the answer came it was low indeed:—

"Wherever the earth's children are, may I be there with them!"

As the vast modern cathedral organ can be traced back through centuries to the throat of a dry reed shaken with its fellows by the wind on the banks of some ancient river, so out of the throats of these children began once more the chant of ages-that deep majestical organ-roll of humanity.

The darkened parlor of the Kentucky farmhouse became the plain where shepherds watched their flocks—it became the Mount of Transfiguration—it became Calvary—it became the Apocalypse. It became the chorus out of all lands, out of all ages:—

"And there were shepherds—The Lord is my shepherd—Unto us a child is born—I know that my Redeemer liveth—I know in whom I have believed—In my Father's house are many mansions—I go to prepare a place for you—Where I am you may be also—The earth shall pass away, but my word will not pass away—Now is Christ risen from the dead—Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God Who is our home—Thou wilt not leave us in the dust—Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me—My Pilot face to face when I have crost the bar—"

In the room was the spiritual hymn of the whole earth from the beginning until now: that somewhere in the universe there is a Father and a Fatherland; that on a dying planet under a dying sun amid myriads of dying stars there is something that does not die—the Youth of Man. In that youth all that had been best in him will come to fullest life; all that was worst will have dropped away.

The room was very still awhile.

Then upon its intense stillness there broke a sound—faint, far away through the snow-thickened air—a melody of coming sleigh-bells. All heard, all listened.

"Hark, hark! Do you hear! Listen! They are coming for me! They're coming!"

The Tree shook as he who was sitting under its branches rose to his feet with these words.

"That is father's sleigh: I know those bells: those are our sleigh-bells. That is father!" said a grave boy excitedly.

"Ah! Is that what you think I hear! Then indeed it is time for me to be going!"

There was a rustling of the boughs of the Christmas Tree as though the guest were leaving.

Nearer, nearer, nearer, along the turnpike came the sound of the bells. At the front gate the sound suddenly ceased.

"They're waiting for me!" said a voice from behind the Tree as it moved away in the direction of the chimney.

Then all heard something more startling still.

The sleigh was approaching the house. Out of the silence and the darkness of Christmas Eve there was travelling toward the house another story—the drama of a man's life.

At the distance of a few hundred yards the sound of the sleigh-bells, borne softly into the room and to the rapt listeners, showed that the driver had turned out of the main drive and begun to encircle the house by that path which enclosed it as within a ring—within the symbol of the eternal.

Under old trees now snow-laden, past the flower-beds of summer, past the long branches of flowering shrubs and of roses that no longer scattered their petals, but now dropped the flowers of the sky, past thoughts and memories, it made its way: as for one who doubles back upon the track of experience with a new purpose and revisits the past as he turns away from it toward another future. Through the darkness, across the fresh snow, on this night of the anniversary of home life, there and on this final Christmas Eve after which all would soon vanish, he drew this band—binding together all the lives there grouped—putting about them the ring of oneness.

That mournful melody of secrecy and darkness began to die out. Fainter and fainter it pulsed through the air. At the gate it was barely heard and then it was not heard: was it gone or was it waiting there?

By the chimney-side there were faint noises.

"He is gone!" whispered Elizabeth with one intense breath.