By the merest oversight, such as might occur in any family excited over the preparations for a Christmas party, Isobel forgot to tell Jimmy Dunn that the plan was changed. She had enough to think of without thinking of that, for she found, at the last moment, that she could not pick up a regularly constituted pair of lovers for the little alcove room, and she had to patch up a temporary pair of lovers by inviting Miss Seiler, depending on Jimmy Dunn to do the best he could as the other half of the pair. Of course Jimmy Dunn does not talk much, and it was apt to be a surprise to him to learn he was scheduled to make love, but Miss Seiler talks enough for two. When Jimmy arrived, about four o'clock Christmas eve, Isobel let him know he was to be a lover, but he was then in the house, and it was too late for him to get away.
Isobel had done nobly in securing guests. Jimmy and Miss Seiler were the only guests from the city, but she had captured some suburbanites. Ten of us made merry at the table—that is, all ten except Jimmy. I was positively ashamed of Jimmy. There we were at the culminating hours of the merry Yule-tide, gathered at the festive board itself, with a bowl of first-rate home-made wassail with ice in it, and Jimmy was expected to smile lovingly, and blush, and all that sort of thing, and what did he do? He sat as mute as a clam, and started uneasily every time a new course appeared. Before dessert arrived he actually arose and asked to be excused.
Now, if you intended making a fool of yourself in a friend's house by impersonating Santa Claus and coming down a chimney in a fur automobile coat, and nonsense like that, you would have sense enough to remember which room upstairs had the chimney that led down into the parlour fireplace, wouldn't you? So I blame Jimmy entirely, and so does Isobel. Jimmy says—of course he had to have some excuse—that we might have told him we had given up the idea of having Santa Claus come down the chimney, and that if we had wanted him to come down any particular chimney we should have put a label on it. “Santa Claus enter here,” I suppose.
Jimmy said he did the best he could; that he knew he did not have much time between the threatened appearance of the dessert and the time he was supposed to issue from the fireplace—and so on! He was quite excited about it. Quite bitter, I may say.
It seems—or so Jimmy says—that, when he left the table, Jimmy went upstairs and got into his automobile coat of fur, and his felt boots, and his mask, and his fur gloves, and his long white hair, and his stocking hat, and that about the time we were sipping coffee he was ready. He says it was no joke to be done up in all those things in an overheated house, and he thought if he got into the chimney he might be in a cool draught, so he poked about until he found a fireplace and backed carefully into it, and pawed with his left foot for the top rung of the ladder. That was about the time we arose from the table with merry laughs, as nearly as Isobel and I can judge.
No one missed Jimmy, except Miss Seiler, and she was so unused to being made love to as Jimmy made love that she thought nothing of a temporary absence. It was not until I took Jimmy's present from the tree and sent one of the Rolfs fairies to hand it to Jimmy that we realized he was not in the parlour, and then Isobel and I both felt hurt to think that Jimmy had selfishly withdrawn from among us when we had gone to all the trouble of getting the other half of a pair of lovers especially on his account. It was not fair to Miss Seiler, and I told Jimmy so the next time I saw him.
When the Rolfs fairy had looked in all the rooms, upstairs and down, and had not found Jimmy, she came back and told Isobel, and that was when Isobel remembered she had forgotten to tell Jimmy we had given up the idea of having a Santa Claus. Isobel looked up the parlour chimney, but he was not there, and then we all started merrily looking up chimneys. We found Santa Claus up the library chimney almost immediately. He was still kicking, but not with much vim—more like a man that is kicking because he has nothing else to do than like a man that enjoys it.