The Red Book Magazine/Volume 18/Number 2/'But Once a Year—'

by George Allan England

 

Illustration: “You knew the truth—It was Christmas Morning!”

 

“But Once a Year—”

By GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND

Author of “Don't You Remember,” etc.

A WAY, ’way back about the time when They first began to say: “Well, don’t you think we might as well get Dado”—(think o’ that for a nickname, will you? Dado! Huh!)—“get Dado something useful this year?”—Christmas used to be really-truly soul inspiring and heart gripping and so cram full of mysteries and hopes and fears and thrills and expectations that even in retrospect it lies infinitely beyond all telling in mere human words.

It began sometime in November, after Thanksgiving was well done and painfully digested; began with a counting off of weeks and days. And as these shortened and the cold and snow set in and it began to get real wintry, the first positive symptoms developed. The tension began to grow. Sometimes, when you just happened to steal into Mother’s or Sister’s room, casually as it were, they would suddenly shut the bottom bureau-drawer and lock it and look aggressively innocent. Even though your years could easily have been counted on your two hands, leaving a few odd thumbs and fingers to spare, you entertained shrewd suspicions about that bureau. But never mind; it was the time of year, They told you, when little boys mustn’t be snooping ’round. “Now, Dado, run away and play! What’s that? Why, of course not! What made you think of such a thing?”

So you went away and tried to play, without any very conspicuous success, for your mind and soul were filled with something you were positive you had seen just before They had heard you and had slammed that bureau-drawer.

The worship of Santa had been shattered by father’s slippers

A natural born skeptic, anyhow, you liberally discounted Their glib explanations. Then, too, you never had felt quite the same about anything They affirmed, since the time, a whole year back, when the Great Disillusionment had crushed down and in upon you. Yet even though the love and worship of Santa (the children’s real God) had been accidentally shattered by father’s slippers projecting from under a fur robe which bore a strong resemblance to the old buffalo-skin in the stable, and by father’s own red beard showing through the cotton-batting, Santa still lurked around somewhere in the back of your mind. I suppose a good many people, who claim to be grown-up, likewise keep cognate beliefs dimly and dustily hid behind their mental furniture. Perhaps all of us do—who knows?

That slipper-incident had been the beginning of the end of good old Santa and the North Pole palace and the reindeer and the stove post-office. How wondrous, while it lasted!—like many another faith we still cling hold of, despite all reasoning, because we need and want such things, because they comfort us and answer the Unanswerable! You felt a vast and personal loss when you realized that there could no longer be any use in praying to Santa or in sending him letters up the chimney. Sister tried to get you to keep up the fiction, but it was no use; you couldn't. The slippers and the buffalo-robe had wrecked all that, forever. But even now, yes, surely you're all that pot bellied old stove with the many isinglass doors all round it—a “base-burner” such as rarely is to be come across in these dull days of furnaces and steam-heat. If any fire on earth could get a message through to Santa, that old base-burner could. It had a big bed of the hottest coals in the world, all wavering and white; and once you threw by accident a beautiful, many-colored rubber ball right through one of those flimsy doors. In a few seconds, nothing remained of the ball save a black and crinkly jigamaree, which, even as you watched it, turned white and fell away to dust. The memory of that tragic loss has not yet faded from your mind.

Upon those ardent coals, before you knew the truth, you used to offer up your little Christmas-letter with as profound and pure a faith as any in this singular mix of men and things that we know as the World. Right into the stove you and Sister used to fling the letter; you used to watch it brown and smoke and suddenly go puff! and vanish in a wisp of black. Then you knew, knew, it had gone to Santa—

The old stove never seemed quite the same, after you found out. A little resentment harbors in your soul, even now, against it. How can we love the instruments that dissect away from us the vestigia which we needs must lose?

Certainly, that letter-writing had to cease. But, here now in your little daughter’s childish scrawl, what lieth on your desk? A modern prayer, saved by your innocent legerdemain from its fiery fate in the kitchen range:

Brown Teddy with swetter, colty, trees, flag, cow, doll and close, Books, kitty Cat, drum hobby horse, boy Doll, mittens ball, Fairy, white Stuffed doggy, Star, bells sled Candle, Big doll, dove-birdy, oggin (orange, of course!) Umbrello cart & Horsey to pull it, doll Carriage trumpet teddy dressed all in Close like a Dolly, set Of furs, clock rabbit or Pig, cart pencil, little Pack of cards, bath tub also Cane, Butterfly, fishy goat.

Is it possible that all this is again enacting itself as a reality in other minds? And that you, now, have to hide away the slippers and the buffalo-robe, lest they disillusion and distress and give the first great deadly shock to Faith?

II

Pass all that, however, and now (if you still can) bring down your mental lens to focus on the actual approach of the great Day That Came But Once a Year—the day, alas, that never comes to you now, and never can, in any faintest simulacrum cf the glory and the splendor it once had. That Day, then, was for your childish year the culmination and the crown. In those times and that far western place where you dwelt, there were no huge, bewildering toy stores, their basements and their counters jammed to distraction with a million gewgaws. Nothing like that existed at all, to take off the keen edge, to blunt the sensibilities and tarnish the bright mirror wherein Joy Absolute reflected itself splendidly. Things meant more then; the blasé child of Now, his mind and palate sated with colored supplements, with weekly toys and with o’ermuch chocolate, how can he revel, as did you, in the gauds of Christmas and the twisty, Elizabethan-ruffy yards and yards of candy? Out West, these days, such things were something. Were they? Just close your eyes, drift back, remember—if you can!—and let your heart make answer.

Illustration: If any fire on earth could get a message through, that old base-burner could

As the Day came nigh, the tension stretched and stretched out like a rubber band aimed with insecticidal intention at a fly. You could feel the very air a-quiver. Everywhere, was mystery. Folks took to coming in the back door and whisking up the kitchen stairs; sometimes, if you were quick enough, you could catch the rustle of paper on strange parcels. Keyed up you were, and eager, and inquisitive; yet God forbid that you should really ever have taken any opportunity to pull out that lower bureau-drawer! How sad, how inexpressibly sacrilegious to have done that—to have discounted the surprises, foretasted the Unknown! Or to have opened prematurely the parcels, little and big, that came by mail (never “by post” in those days—no, by mail) from Aunt Eva, or Uncle Fred, very neatly wrapped and tied with pink string and conspicuously marked in the best possible printing: “Don’t Open Till Christmas!” Oh, never! That would have been like beginning dinner with the blancmange or the floating island and so working backward to the meat-victuals and the soup.

No, all such things were kept inviolate, spirited away by Mother or by Sis, to join the goodly company of the bureau-drawer. But just to handle and poke and sniff and speculate-—there were pretty fair-sized thrills even in that!

The days, behold, they passed. They became seven, five, three, one—then, lo! To-morrow was Christmas! The strain was breaking. It couldn't last. Every hour became pregnant, every minute electrical. The Leyden-jar of time was crackling full of dynamic force, waiting only for the appointed hour to flash into glory and bright joy such as never is on land or sea for Grown-ups.

You knew, of course, that the tree, The Tree Itself, had secretly been brought in and stood up in the back parlor, its tip almost touching the plaster; but you didn’t peek—not so much because you were bidden not to, as because you couldn't, wouldn't, violate that sacred presence. I suppose the worshiper of Isis might as easily have pulled aside the veil and sought to gaze upon—what?—The Mystery—the chief charm of which lay, after all, in its inviolability. That room and the bottom drawer, to which your mind perpetually reverts, both were hedged round with a divinity like that of the taboo viands of a Polynesian chief. Yes, you remember that once, once only, you did break faith. When They were all downstairs, at dinner, you did sneak, trembling, into Mother’s room. You tiptoed toward the bureau, listening with big red ears lest They should hear and know your perfidy. Strong upon you lay the sense of treason and of sin; but you persisted. You reached the place; you seized the drawer-handles. That little un-oiled squeak filled you with sick terror. But you kept on your lawless way, unsanctified and deadly-criminal.

An inch you tugged open the drawer! With wide eyes you beheld a painted something—pink paper—ribbons! Then up surged strong revulsion. With a quick closing of the eyes, a turning away of the head, you shut the drawer and crept off. And dinner seemed to choke you. The shame, you felt, must cry aloud to everybody around the table. Brother Paul’s big eyes, inquisitively blue, especially struck terror. You resolved that if you only got through, this time, you’d never, never, Never snoop again.

III

I rather hesitate about trying to describe Christmas Eve. It’s too big for my limited vocabulary. Wise, spectacled philogists tell us the English language contains some 400,000 words. Not enough, by half, to tell what Christmas means to an imaginative child—even after he’s seen the slippers and the buffalo-robe. I suppose, however, I can make a feeble try at the job. So here goes.

On Christmas Eve, They had an early supper so as to get the work all done up and the dishes washed and such-like foolish, inconsequential, trivial incongruities attended to and out of the way. You were allowed to sit up till nine, which was in itself a rare and splendid treat, something almost wicked in its license. Right after supper They casually asked you to step down to the post-office to see if there were any more letters or packages. (Strange, how stupid Grown-ups are, as they move in their slow orbits and do and say so many dull, uninteresting, obvious things, believing, all the time, that Little Pitchers do not comprehend!) But you never “let on.” You went, knowing full well the reason of that sending, knowing that when you should return, the tree would be all ready, glorious, radiant, transcendent.

So it befell, indeed. Sort of odd, was it not, that the reality always dropped just a bit, a teeny-weeny bit below the expectation? Oh yes, of course, it really did dazzle you, when the double doors were rolled back and when you (the cynosure of many seniors whose principal amusement very evidently lay in watching how happy you were) caught the first sight of that glory of green boughs, polychromatic candles, glittering things and knobby bundles. Of course, it made your heart pound considerably, the sight of all those things hanging by twine: the candy cane, de rigueur always, the useful presents done up with red ribbon and making a tremendous bluff at being Christmassy, as though shoes and shirts and pants ever could be Christmassy in spite of all the ribbon in the world!! And then the “Maud S.” bright crimson sled and the books and the wooden train down under the tree.

But after all, alas, it was kind of anticlimactic, too, and—human! there there! I guess I wont expand that point at all. No use throwing any wet blankets on the innocent joy of Parents while leading their offspring to the tree as to an altar of unconscious self-aggrandizement.

You always had to open some of your things, amid “Ooh’s” and “Ah’s,” and exclamations of: “Now, I wonder what that is?” and “What? Another one for Dado?” before anybody else would touch any of theirs. Only then, when the first flush had passed, did They sandwich in some of their own gifts and then some more of yours, and so on, trying not to let anybody feel slighted or overlooked or left out in any way. Even good, old, red-faced Mary, the cook, standing in the background, had to take her regulation yearly apron and dress-pattern and ten-cent bottle of Florida-water—this last, from you, clumsily tied with a pink string. Poor, patient Mary, where is she now? Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan? Gone, together with all her aprons and her dresses, and her ten-cent bottles, and her works, too, quite gone, finished, vanished back into the Dark—save only as you flick them up for a brief moment, once more, on the screen of memory.

Somehow you felt a strange, inexplicable, shame-faced bashfulness as They poked and pried and fingered the bundles and made believe to wonder what was in them and who they came from and all that sort of thing. Because, really and truly, you knew they knew, and you penetrated the slipper-and-buffalo-robe quality even in that. You had a feeling hard to tell about, or even to understand. The false note in the chorus jarred your child-soul, little and half-formed and plastic as a nestling bird. But that wore off, what with the excitement of seeing your material goods and chattels rapidly mass up, while the floor littered itself with endless paper—much more paper than was necessary, you thought. Fact is, some of the very little things were done up and done up and done up till, huh! the present was nothing but a kind of nut-kernel in a tremendous shell! However, that “went,” too. Everything goes, Once a Year.

Thus, things sorted themselves out unto their rightful owners, and kisses were exchanged—some real good ones and some, from elderly visiting Aunts, that were after all nothing but moist pecks. And it was altogether wonderful and glad and sad and cosmic; and in your little heart swelled strange thoughts and feelings, unspoken, unspeakable, because the little brain as yet knew not the words whereby even to attempt translation.

“Now, Dado, don’t eat too much of that Christmas candy,” warned Mother, “or you'll have one of your headaches to-morrow and spoil all the fun.” And, “Well, I guess that’s everything, now,” said Sister. “Say, might’s well put these candles out,” suggested Brother, his voice broken and gruff, now high, now low. “They’re drippin’ on the carpet, looky! We c’n use ’em again to-morrow night if we save ’em.”

So the Tree grew dark, with puffs and little twisty spirals of ill-smelling smoke writhing up from the wicks. And you were somehow glad of that, too, glad to be let alone a little, for a while to run your wooden train with “Mexican Central” painted on the tender, back and forth across the carpet, glad to get a chance to investigate what made the wooden donkey kick. (Only a wire, after all; no magic!) Glad, when Mother said, “Now, Dado, bed-time. Don’t forget you’ve still got that stocking!

IV

After you were all stowed and tucked into your crib, the one with the round wooden bars—and were stretched out in your canton-flannel nighty, and Mother had heard your “Now I Lay Me,” and had kissed you, then you cuddled the engine and the donkey in your arms and tried to think what the stocking would be like. For a while you couldn’t sleep at all, even after the lamp was carried out. Gas, in those days? Well, I should say not! The hum and murmur of voices, down-stairs, excited you considerably. The realization that The Day was close at hand, would positively be here now in just a few hours, banished sleepiness. ‘Then, all at once, a voice was crying “Merry Christmas!” and up you sat in your cribby darkness, rubbing your eyes. Your heart gave a great big e-normous jump. You realized, you knew the truth: It was Christmas morning!

Do you remember that big, old, stuffed chair which rocked on a carved base, and had fringe and tassels about everywhere that fringe and tassels could by any ingenuity be made to adhere? It was covered with frayed stuff and it once had rocked upon your fingers just previous to a cataclysmic howling-spell. But for all its primeval ugliness and its vicious finger-pinching propensities, you loved it—for always to that chair and never, no, never to any other, was the stocking hung.

Illustration: Of course it made your heart bound

That stocking invariably was fastened with a safety-pin to the top of the chair, and fell in lumpy obesity down along the steep incline thereof. It loomed huge, almost ominous, in the half-dark of winter morn. As you climbed out of bed and ran to it, thrilled again with even more poignant emotions than the night before, the Grown-ups just happened in, all dressed; and there were more of those obnoxious “Oh’s” and “Ah’s.” Dimly, below the big round toe where the annual orange lay, rammed fast down with charges of hard candy and with many, many things wrapped in paper that looked terribly like what had been already used for the presents on the tree, other parcels were stacked between the capacious arms of the old rocker. The hour that followed, as one by one the knobs were hauled out of the lankening hosiery, and as one by one the parcels yielded up their vitals, nary word of mine can picture. It was the x or n of human happiness, voilà tout. Why spoil it by descriptions foreordained, foredoomed to failure?

That was the climax. The expectation and attainment, those constituted the true joy. All the rest, that day and later—the actual craunching of the candy cane, the veritable playing with the wooden engine or the donkey or Maud S.—though pleasant enough, was nevertheless of this world, worldly, not much different from any usual play. With tangible possession, the superhuman, the mystic elements departed. What Nietzche might perhaps have called the “over-bliss” could not endure. Whither did it fade? You knew not; you knew only that the Commonplace soon elbowed out the Dream.

V

There came a winter when Father no longer played with you, no longer told you stories or made you whistles, or, with any of his thousand fascinating ways, diverted you, but lay in bed, very pale and still, while the doctors came and went and everyone spoke in lowered tones. There came a Christmas when the house was still; when you were wakened in the night by Mother’s voice, all choked and strange; when Mother bent over you and clasped you in her arms and tried to tell you something, but could not; when you felt her tears upon your face; when Terror gripped you.

Then you were lifted out of bed and carried off downstairs in the gloom. You could not understand. You only clung to Mother, silent, shivering, while a vague and nameless fear clutched you as with talons.

They bore you to Father’s room, and the fear grew upon you. The night-light burned lugubrious and dim. People were there. Wavering shadows rose and fell and danced along the walls. Everybody was crying. You saw Sister and Brother; and yet to you they seemed strange and far. An unusual dignity possessed them. They did not speak to you, hardly noticed you at all. Mary was there, also, crying like the rest. Only the doctor did not cry. And that, too, puzzled you. But you didn’t cry either—you could not.

No, not even when they told you Father was gone, that he could never come back again to play with you or read to you or walk with you any more or hold you in his lap. You could not grasp such knowledge as reality. There must be (you knew) a big mistake about it, somewhere. Why, Father was the strongest man in the whole world, wasn’t he? And the tallest? And knew the most of anybody? Could that huge man, who tossed you up so lightly in his arms, that stern yet loving man with the red beard, the hearty laugh, the little jokes and funny ways, go away off forever like anybody else? No, that was unthinkable!

With chattering teeth and shivering body, you stole like a little pink canton-flannel ghost up the long dark stairs, padded quickly through the hall and so got back to bed again, somehow, there to lie and tremble and wonder, uncomprehending, till sleep, all-merciful, wiped for a while all grief away.

 

Christmas! Type of all human life, when once you understand. Precursor, with its slippers and its buffalo-robe, of that long, progressive, ever-accelerating process, the loosening of the bonds of faith, one by one, which for so many of us can never end till “bed-time.”

Christmas! Image, in itself, of the whole story, of human life and human understanding. And who shall judge you, Christmas? Who, truly, save a child?