Neighborhood Stories. Zona Gale

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СКАЧАТЬ shut up. I honestly think they kind of appreciated, in a nice, neighborly way, making Silas feel mean—when he’d ought to.

      It was a little harder to make the Sunday-school superintendents see the thing that I had in my head. Of course, when a thing has been the way it has been for a good while, you can’t really blame people for feeling that it’s been the way it ought to be. Feelings seems made that way. Our superintendent has been our superintendent for ’most forty years—ever since the church was built—and of course his thoughts is kind of turned to bone in some places, naturally.

      His name is Jerry Bemus, and he keeps a little harness shop next door to the Town Hall that’s across from Market Square. When I went in that day he was resting from making harnesses, and he was practising on his cornet. He can make a bugle call real nice—you can often hear it, going up and down Daphne Street in the morning, and when I’m down doing my trading I always like to hear it—it gives me kind of a nice, old-fashioned feeling, like when Abigail Arnold fries doughnuts in the back of the Home Bakery and we can all smell ’em, out in the road.

      “Jerry,” I says, “how much is our Sunday-school Christmas tree going to cost us?”

      Jerry’s got a wooden leg, and he can not remember not to try to cross it over the other one. He done that now, and give it up.

      “We calc’late about twenty-five dollars,” says he, proud.

      “What we going to do to celebrate?”

      “Well,” he says, “have speaking pieces—we got a program of twenty numbers already,” says he, pleased. “And a trimmed tree, and an orange, and a bag of nuts and candy for every child,” he says.

      “All the other churches is going to do the same,” I says. “Five trees and five programs and five sets of stuff all around. And all of ’em on Christmas Eve, when you’d think we’d all sort of draw together instead of setting apart, in cliques. Land,” I says out, “that first Christmas Eve wouldn’t the angels have stopped singing and wept in the sky if they could of seen what we’d do to it!”

      “Hush, Calliope,” says Jerry Bemus, shocked. “They ain’t no need to be sacrilegious, is they?”

      “Not a bit,” says I; “we’ve been it so long a’ready, worshiping around in sections like Hottentots. Well, now,” I says, “do you honestly think we’ve all chose the best way to go at Christmas Eve for the children, filling them up with colored stuff and getting their stummicks all upset?”

      We had quite a little talk about it, back and forth, Jerry and me. And all of a sudden, while I was trying my best to make him see what I saw, I happened to notice his bugle again.

      “There ain’t no thrill in none of it,” I was saying to him. “Not half so much,” I says, “as there is in your bugle. When I hear that go floating up and down the street, I always kind of feel like it was announcing something. To my notion,” I says, “it could announce Christmas to this town far better than forty-’leven little separate trimmed-up trees.... Why, Jerry,” I says out sudden, “listen to what I’ve thought of....”

      A little something had come in my head that minute, unexpected, that fitted itself into the rest of my plan. And it made Jerry say, pretty soon, that he was willing to go with me to see the other superintendents; and we done so that very day. Ain’t it funny how big things work out by homely means—by homely means? Sole because the choir-leader in one choir had resigned because the bass in that choir was the bass in that choir, and so they didn’t have anybody there to train their Christmas music, and sole because another congregation was hard up and was having to borrow its Christmas celebration money out of the foreign missionary fund—we got ’em to see sense. And then the other two joined in.

      The schools were all right from the first, being built, like they are, on a basis of belonging to everybody, same as breathing and one-two other public utilities, and nothing dividing anybody from anybody. And I begun to feel like life and the world was just one great bud, longing to open, so be it could get enough care.

      The worst ones to get weaned away from a perfectly selfish way of observing Christ’s birthday was the private families. Land, land, I kept saying to myself them days, we all of us act like we was studying kindergarten mathematics. We count up them that’s closest to us, and we can’t none of us seem to count much above ten.

      Not all of ’em was that way, though. Well—if it just happens that you live in any town whatever in the civilized world, I think you’ll know about what I had said to me.

      On the one hand it went about like this, from Mis’ Timothy Toplady and the Holcombs and the Hubbelthwaits and a lot more:

      “Well, land knows, it’d save us lots of back-aching work—but—will the children like it?”

      “Like it?” I says. “Try ’em. Trust ’em without trying ’em if you want to. I would. Remember,” I couldn’t help adding, “you like to be with the children a whole lot oftener than they like to be with you. What they like is to be together.”

      And, “Well, do you honestly think it’ll work? I don’t see how it can—anything so differ’nt.”

      And, “Well, they ain’t any harm trying it one year, as I can see. That can’t break up the holidays, as I know of.”

      But the other side had figured it out just like the other side of everything always figures.

      “Calliope,” says Mis’ Postmaster Sykes, “are you crazy-headed? What’s your idee? Ain’t things all right the way they’ve always been done?”

      “Well,” says I, conservative, “not all of ’em. Not wholesale, I wouldn’t say.”

      “But you can’t go changing things like this,” she told me. “What’ll become of Christmas?”

      “Christmas,” I says, “don’t need you or me, Mis’ Sykes, to be its guardians. All Christmas needs is for us to get out of its way, and leave it express what it means.”

      “But the home Christmas,” she says, ’most like a wail. “Would you do away with that?”

      Then I sort of turned on her. I couldn’t help it.

      “Whose home?” I says stern. “If it’s your home you mean, or any of the thousands of others like it where Christmas is kept, then you know, and they all know, that nothing on earth can take away the Christmas feeling and the Christmas joy as long as you want it to be there. But if it’s the homes you mean—and there’s thousands of ’em—where no Christmas ever comes, you surely ain’t arguing to keep them the way they’ve been kept?”

      But she continued to shake her head.

      “You can do as you like, of course,” she said, “and so can everybody else. It’s their privilege. But as for me, I shall trim my little tree here by our own fireside. And here we shall celebrate Christmas—Jeddie and Nora and father and me.”

      “Why can’t you do both?” I says. “I wouldn’t have you give up your fireside end of things for anything on earth. But why can’t you do both?”

      Mis’ Sykes didn’t rightly seem to know—at least she didn’t say. But she give me to understand that her mind run right along in the self-same groove it had had СКАЧАТЬ