He knew who Santa Claus was. He had often seen him in the windows of the big stores, surrounded by tempting packages, and driving reindeer harnessed to a sleigh. He knew that he drove over the roofs of houses, down chimneys, and out through grates. Somewhere, too, he harbored the suspicion that this was only childish talk, and that the real Santa Claus must be a father or a mother, or in this case Mrs. Crewdson; only both childish talk and fact simmered without conflict in his brain. It was easier to think that a supernatural goodwill had brought him this profusion than that commonplace hands, which had never done much for him hitherto, should all of a sudden be busy on his behalf.
Raising himself on his elbow, his first thought came with the bubbling of a sob. "My mudda is in jail!" His second was in the nature of a corollary, "But she'll like it when I tell her that Santa Claus took care of her little boy." The deduction gave him permission to enjoy himself.
At first he only gazed in a rapture that hardly guessed at what was beneath these snowy coverings. What he was to get was secondary to the fact that he was getting something. For the first time in his life he was taken into that vast family of boys and girls for whom Christmas has significance. Up to this morning he had stood outside of it wistfully—yearning, hoping, and yet condemned to stand aloof. Now, if his mudda hadn't been in jail....
The parcels were larger and smaller. Beginning with the smallest, he arranged them according to size. Merely to touch them sent a thrill through his frame. The smallest was round like an orange and yet yielded to pressure. He was almost sure it was a rubber ball. He could have been quite sure, only that he preferred the condition of suspense.
It was long before he could bring himself to untie the first red ribbon bow, his surprise on finding a rubber ball being no less keen than if he hadn't known it was a rubber ball on first taking it between his fingers. A handkerchief laid out flat, making the second parcel seem bigger than it was, sent him up in the scale of social promotion. By way of candies, nuts, a toothbrush with tooth paste, he came to the largest of all, a History of Mankind, written in words of one syllable, and garnished with highly-colored pictures of various racial types. If only his mother hadn't been in jail....
That his mother was no longer in jail was a fact he learned later in the day. It was a day of extremes, of quick rushes of rapture out of which he would fall suddenly, to go away somewhere and moan. When he begged, as he begged every hour or two, to be taken to the jail, he could be distracted by rompings with the other children, most of them in some such case as his own, or by some novelty in the life. To eat turkey and plum pudding at the head of one of three long tables, each seating twelve or fourteen, was to be raised to a point of social eminence beyond which it seemed there could be nothing more to reach. But in the midst of this pride the hard facts would recur to him, and turkey and plum pudding choke him.
That something had happened he began to infer when his beloved policeman appeared at the home in the afternoon. Having seen him enter, the boy ran up to him.
"Oh, mister, are you going to take me to the jail?"
Mister patted him on the head, though he answered, absently, "Not just now, sonny. You know you're goin' to have a Christmas Tree. I've come to see Miss Honiton."
Miss Honiton, one of the day matrons, having appeared at the end of the hall, the policeman turned him about by the shoulders.