4. Christmas at the Ellis Place
It took two trips in the car to transport the Christmas guests and gifts from Woodhow over to the Ellis place. It was one of the few pretentious houses in Elmhurst. For seven generations it had been in the Ellis family. The old house sat far back from the road with a double drive curving like a big U around it. Huge elms stood protectingly before it, and behind lay a succession of buildings from the old forge, no longer used, to the smokehouse. One barn stood across the road and another at the top of the lane.
Doris and Tommy were the first to run up the steps and into the center hall, almost bumping into Billie as he ran to meet them. Behind him came Mrs. Ellis in a soft gray suit. Her white blouse was fastened at the throat with a cameo pin. “Come right in, all of you,” she called happily. “Do stop jumping up and down, Tommy, you make me nervous. Merry Christmas.”
Up the long colonial staircase she led the way into the big guest room. Down in the library, Beth was playing softly on the big square piano, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem. The air was filled with the scent of pine and hemlock, and enticing odors of things cooking stole up the back stairs.
Doris and Billie retreated to a corner with the latter’s book supply, with Tommy and Jack peering over Billie’s shoulder to get a look too. It was hard to realize that this was really Billie, the Huckleberry Finn of the summer before. All of the old self-consciousness and shy abstraction had gone. Even the easy comradely manner in which he leaned over the Judge’s chair showed the good understanding and sure confidence between the two.
“Yes, he does show up real proud,” Becky agreed warmly with Mrs. Craig when they were all downstairs before the glowing fire. “Of course, we’re going to miss him when he goes away to school, but he’s getting along splendidly. I want him to go where he’ll associate with plenty of other boys. He’s lived alone with the ants and bees and rabbits long enough.”
As the others went in to dinner Jean lingered behind a minute to glance about the pleasant room. The fire crackled down in the deep old rock hearth. In each of the windows a white candle was burning brightly. Festoons of ground pine and evergreen draped the mantelpiece. Jean gazed out at the somber, frost-touched garden. There wasn’t one bit of peace in her heart, even while she fairly ached with the longing to be like the others.
“You’re a coward, Jean Craig, a deliberate coward,” she told herself. “You don’t like the country one bit. You love the city where everybody’s doing something, and it’s just a rat race for all. You’re longing for everything you can’t have, and you’re afraid to face the winter up here. You might just as well tell yourself the truth. You hate to be poor.”
There came a burst of laughter from the dining room and Kit calling to her to hurry up. It appeared that Doris, the tender-hearted, had said pathetically when Mrs. Gorham, the housekeeper, brought in the great roast turkey, “Poor old General Putnam!”
“That isn’t the General,” Billie called from his place. “The General ran away yesterday. First off, he lit up in the apple trees. Then as soon as he saw Ben was high enough, off he flopped and made for the corncrib. Just as he caught up with him there, he chose the wagon sheds and perched on the rafters, and when he’d almost got hold of his tail feathers, if he didn’t try the barn and all his flock after him, mind you. So he thought he’d let him roost till dark, and when he stole in after supper, the old codger had gone, bag and baggage. He’ll come back as soon as he knows our minds aren’t set on wishbones.”
“Then who is this?” asked Kit, quite as if it were some personage who rested in state on the big willow platter.
“That is some unnamed patriot who died for his country’s good,” said the Judge solemnly. “Who says white meat and who says dark?”
“For pity’s sake, child, what are you crying about?” exclaimed Becky after dinner while they were all sitting around the table talking leisurely.
Jack sobbed sleepily, “I—I don’t know.”
“He’s lonely for his own family,” Doris spoke up.
“I ain’t neither,” groaned Jack, “it’s too much mince pie.”
So under Becky’s directions, Billie took him up to his room, and administered “good hot water and soda.”
“Too bad, ’cause he missed seeing all the things taken off the tree,” said Becky, laying aside Jack’s presents for him, a long warm knit muffler from herself, a fine knife from the Judge with a pocket chain on it, a package of Billie’s books that he had had as a child, and ice skates from the Craigs. After much figuring over the balance left from their Christmas money they had gone together on the skates for him, knowing he would have more fun and exercise out of them than anything, and he needed something to bring back the sparkle to his eyes and the color to his cheeks.
“Put them all up on the bed beside him, and he’ll find them in the morning,” Billie suggested. “If you’ll let him stay, Mrs. Craig, I’ll bring him over.”
Tommy was the most excited over his Christmas presents. Kit and Jean had given him a hockey stick and puck to use on the river when it was frozen over, his mother and father a ping pong set that he was bursting to set up in the basement, a model airplane kit from Doris, and a pair of argyle socks and Norwegian sweater from the Judge and Becky. But Billie had given him his most coveted present, his own tame crow, Moki. “Where’d you get the name from, Billie?” he asked.
Billie stroked the smooth glossy back of the crow fondly. “I found him one day over in the pine woods on the hill. He was just a little thing then. The nest was in a dead pine, and somebody’d shot it all to pieces. The rest of the family had gone, but I found him fluttering around on the ground, scared to death with a broken wing. Ben helped me fix it, and he told me to call him Moki. You know he’s read everything, and he can talk some Indian, Pequod mostly, he says. He isn’t sure but what there may be some Pequod in him way back, he can talk it so well, and Moki means ‘watch out’ in Pequod. I call him that because I used to put him on my shoulder and he’d go anywhere with me through the woods, and call out when he thought I was in danger.”
“How do you know what he thought?”
“After you get acquainted with him, you’ll know what he thinks too,” answered Billie.
Always living in a little world of make-believe all her own, Doris received mostly fairy tales and what Kit called “princess stories.” Saved from the old home at Sandy Cove, her mother and father gave her two glass lamps for her bureau and Jean had made the shades herself, out of starched white dotted swiss. Becky had knit each of the girls soft angora socks and mittens in matching pastels, and Beth gave them old silver spoons that had been part of their great great-grandmother Peabody’s wedding silver.
“When you come to New York,” she told Jean, “I’ll show you many of her things.”
Jean nodded, remembering her longing to go away earlier in the evening. But the look in her father’s face made her realize more than anything that had happened in the long months of trial in the country, how worthwhile was the sacrifice that had brought him back into his home country for healing and happiness.