Christmas | Page 9

stranger to me. I'll just wait a minute to see if birth or death
gets out of the envelope.")
As she closed Mary's gate and hurried up the walk, in a keen wind
flowing with little pricking flakes, Jenny was startled to see both
parlour windows open. The white muslin curtains were blowing idly as
if June were in the air. Turning as a matter of course to the path that led
to the kitchen, she was hailed by Mary, who came out the front door
with a rug in her hands.
"Step right in this way," said Mary; "this door's unfastened."
"Forevermore!" Jenny said, "Mary Chavah! What you got your house
all open for? You ain't moving?"

A gust of wind took Mary's answer. She tossed the rug across the icy
railing of the porch and beckoned Jenny into the house, and into the
parlour. And when she had greeted Jenny after the months of her
absence:--
"See," Mary said exultantly, "don't it look grand and empty? Look at it
first, and then come on in and I'll tell you about it."
The white-papered walls of the two rooms were bare of pictures; the
floor had been sparingly laid with rugs. The walnut sofa and chairs, the
table for the lamp, and the long shelves of her grandfather's
books--these were all that the room held. A white arch divided the two
chambers, like a benign brow whose face had long been dimmed away.
It was all exquisitely clean and icy cold. A little snow drifted in through
the muslin curtains. The breath of the two women showed.
"What on earth you done that for?" Jenny demanded.
Mary Chavah stood in the empty archway, the satisfaction on her face
not veiling its pure austerity. She was not much past thirty-three, but
she looked older, for she was gaunt. Her flesh had lost its firmness, her
dressmaking had stooped her, her strong frame moved as if it habitually
shouldered its way. In her broad forehead and deep eyes and somewhat
in her silent mouth, you read the woman--the rest of her was obscured
in her gentle reticence. She had a gray shawl, blue-bordered, folded
tightly about her head and pinned under her chin, and it wrapped her to
her feet.
"I feel like a thing in a new shell," she said. "Come on in where it's
warm."
Instead of moving her dining-room table to her kitchen, as most of Old
Trail Town did in Winter, Mary had moved her cooking stove into the
dining room, had improvised a calico-curtained cupboard for the
utensils, and there she lived and sewed. The windows were bare.
"I'll let the parlour have curtains if it wants to," she had said, "but in the
room I live in I want every strip of the sun I can get."

There were no plants, though every house in Old Trail Town had a
window of green, and slips without number were offered....
"... You can have flowers all you want," she said once; "I like 'em too
well to box 'em up in the house."
And there were no books.
"I don't read," she admitted; "I ain't ever read a book in my life but
"Pilgrim's Progress" and the first four chapters of "Ben Hur." What's
the use of pretending, when books is such a nuisance to dust?
Grandfather's books in the parlour--oh, they ain't books. They're
furniture."
But she had a little bookcase whose shelves were filled with her
patterns--in her dressmaking she never used a fashion plate.
"I like to make 'em up and cut 'em out," she sometimes told her friends.
"I don't care nothing whatever about the dresses when they get
done--more fool the women for ornamenting themselves up like lamp
shades, I always think. But I just do love to fuss with the paper and
make it do like I say. Land, I've got my cupboard full of more patterns
than I'd ever get orders for if I lived to be born again."
She sat down before the cooking stove and drew off her woolen mittens.
She folded a hand on her cheek, forcing the cheek out of drawing by
her hand's pressure. There was always about her gestures a curious
nakedness--indeed, about her face and hands. They were naïve,
perfectly likely to reveal themselves in their current awkwardness and
ugliness of momentary expression which, by its very frankness, made a
new law as it broke an old one.
"Don't you tell folks I've been house cleaning," she warned Jenny. "The
town would think I was crazy, with the thermometer acting up zero so.
Anyway, I ain't been house cleaning. I just simply got so sick to death
of all the truck piled up in this house that I had to get away from it.