Neighborhood Stories. Zona Gale

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СКАЧАТЬ night, for instance, when I come round the corner on to Daphne Street at half-past seven on Christmas Eve, I thought I was going to have to waste a minute or two standing just where the bill-board makes a shadow for the arc-light, trying to get used to the idea of what we were doing—used to it in my throat. But there wasn’t much time to spend that way, being there were things to do between then and eight o’clock, when we’d told ’em all to be there. So I ran along and tried not to think about it—except the work part. ’Most always, the work part of anything’ll steady you.

      The great cedar-of-Lebanon-looking tree, standing down there on the edge of the Market Square and acting as if it had been left from some long-ago forest, on purpose, had been hung round with lines and lines of strung pop-corn—the kind that no Christmas tree would be a Christmas tree without, because so many, many folks has set up stringing it nights of Christmas week, after the children was in bed, and has kept it, careful, in a box, so’s it’d do for next year. We had all that from the churches—Methodist and Presbyterian and Episcopal and Baptist and Catholic pop-corn, and you couldn’t tell ’em apart at all when you got ’em on the tree. The festoons showed ghostly-white in the dark and the folks showed ghostly-black, hurrying back and forth doing the last things.

      And the folks was coming—you could hear ’em all along Daphne Street, tripping on the bad place that hadn’t been mended because it was right under the arc-light, and coming over the hollow-sounding place by Graham’s drug-store, and coming from the little side streets and the dark back streets and the streets down on the flats. Some of ’em had Christmas trees waiting at home—the load had been there on the Market Square, just like we had let it be there for years without seeing that the Market Square had any other Christmas uses—and a good many had bought trees. But a good many more had decided not to have any—only just to hang up stockings; and to let the great big common Christmas tree stand for what it stood for, gathering most of that little garland of Daphne Street trees up into its living heart.

      Over by the bandstand I come on them I’d been looking for—Eddie Newhaven and Arthur Mills and Lily Dorron and Sarah and Mollie and the Cartwrights and Lifty and six-eight more.

      “Hello, folks,” I says. “What you down here for? Why ain’t you home?”

      They answered all together:

      “For the big tree!”

      “Are you, now?” I says—just to keep on a-talking to ’em. “Whose tree?”

      I love to remember the way they answered. It was Eddie Newhaven that said it.

      “Why, all of us’s!” he said.

      All of us’s! I like to say it over when they get to saying “mine” and “theirs” too hard where I am.

      When it was eight o’clock and there was enough gathered on the Square, they done the thing that was going to be done, only nobody had known how well they were going to do it. They touched the button, and from the bottom branch to the tip-top little cone, the big old tree came alight, just like it knew what it was all about and like it had come out of the ground long ago for this reason—only we’d never known. Two hundred little electric lights there were, colored, and paid for private, though I done my best to get the town to pay for ’em, like it ought to for its own tree; but they was paid for private—yet.

      It made a little oh! come in the crowd and run round, it was so big and beautiful, standing there against the stars like it knew well enough that it was one of ’em, whether we knew it or not. And coming up across the flats, big and gold and low, was the moon, most full, like it belonged, too.

      “And glory shone around,” I says to myself—and I stood there feeling the glory, outside and in. Not my little celebration, and your little celebration, and their little celebration, private, that was costing each of us more than it ought to—but our celebration, paying attention to the message that Christ paid attention to.

      I was so full of it that I didn’t half see Ben Cory and his carolers come racing out of the dark. They was all fixed up in funny pointed hoods and in cloaks and carrying long staves with everybody’s barn-yard lanterns tied on the end of ’em, and they run out in a line down to the tree, and they took hold of hands and danced around it, singing to their voices’ top a funny old tune, one of them tunes that, whether you’ve ever heard it before or not, kind of makes things in you that’s older than you are yourself wake up and remember, real plain.

      And Jerry Bemus shouted out at ’em: “Sing it again—sing it again!” and pounded his wooden leg with his cane. “Sing it again, I tell you. I ain’t heard anybody sing that for goin’ on forty years.” And everybody laughed, and they sung it again for him, and some more songs that had come out of the old country that a little bit of it was living inside everybody that was there. And while they were singing, it came to me all of a sudden about another night, ’most three hundred years before, when on American soil that lonesome English heart, up there in Boston, had dreamed ahead to a time when Christmas would come here....

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