The Doctor's Christmas Eve

by James Lane Allen

Elizabeth was nondescript. Her hair was golden-red and as soft as woven wind. Her skin had the fairness of peach bloom when bees are coming and going in the sunlit air and there is such sweetness. Under her eyes lay a deeper flush like that sometimes seen on a child's face after a first day's sunburn by the waterside in springtime. Her own face might have been called the face of four crescents. Two of the crescents you always saw—her eyebrows, twin down-curved bands of palest gold. In order to see the other crescents, you had only to tell Elizabeth some story. As you finished, she who had been leaning over toward you slowly closed her eyes and drew in a breath as though to drink the last delight of it; her thin lips parted tightly across her pointed little teeth in a smile of thanks; and then in each cheek a curved dimple came out, shaped like what the farmers in Elizabeth's country call "a dry moon" when it appears thus set up on end in the evening sky—the water for the month having all run out.

Elizabeth's nose did not appear to have originated in the New World, but to be one of those steep Lombard noses, which on the faces of northern Italians seem to have started down the Alps in a landslide, to have gone a certain distance toward the Mediterranean, and then suddenly to have disappeared over the precipice of the chin. Across the Alpine nose was stretched a tiny spiderweb golden bridge: Elizabeth wore spectacles. The frames were of the palest gold—she insisted they must be the exact color of her eyebrows.

It was the glasses perhaps that gave to her face its look of dreaminess. But there were times when her eyes pained. (All the doctors had never been able to keep them from paining.) And this often compelled her to sit with them closed and do nothing; then her face became dreamier. But always the look bespoke an introspection of happiness. It drew your mind back to the work of those unknown artisans of Tanagra, who centuries before our era expressed in little terra-cotta figures the freedom and joy of Greek children in the old Greek life. Whatever the children are doing, they are happy about it; if they are doing nothing, they are happy about doing nothing.

Thus, as long as Elizabeth's eyes were open on the world, they found the things that made her happy, neglecting the rest. No psyche winging the wide plain ever went more surely to its needed blossom, disregarding otherwise the crowded acres. And when her tired eyes were closed and the golden bridge was lifted off the Lombard nose, they were opened upon an inner world as enchanting. For with that gift which belongs to childhood and to genius alone, as the real things of life which she had loved disappeared, she caught them alive and transferred them to another land. There also she kept all the other beautiful things that had never been real on the earth but ought to have been real, as she insisted; and on these Elysian Fields her spirit went to play. She was already old enough to realize that she was constantly outgrowing things; but as they were borne backward into the distance she turned and laid her fingers on her lips in farewell to them—little Niobe of unshed tears over life's changes. Her soul seemed to be this, that she could not turn against anything she once had loved, nor cease to be loyal to it after it was ruined or gone. As a swallow remembers the eaves whether the skies be bright or dark, the nature of Elizabeth sheltered itself under the old world's roof of love.

It was this intense fidelity of character that now kept her in her watch at the window, waiting for the two friends who were to make them four children on Christmas Eve. Once, indeed, as no figures were to be seen far or near out on the winter landscape, she turned softly into the room, and much against her will continued her search for the key that would unlock the doors connecting the library with the parlor—the dark and suddenly mysterious parlor where the Christmas Tree now stood.

There was a mingling of three odors in the library that forenoon. Into one wall an old white marble mantel-piece was built, decorated on each side with huge bunches of grapes—a votive offering by Bacchus, god of the inner fire, to Pluto, god of the outer fire. This mantel now held in its heart a crimson glow of anthracite coals; and the wintry smell of coal gas was comfortably pervasive. Making its summer-like way through the gas was the fragrance of rose geranium, some pots of which were blooming on a window-sill just inside the silvery landscapes of frost. A third and more powerful odor was that of a bruised evergreen, boughs of which had been crushed in handling, and the sap of which, oozing from the trunk, scattered far its wild balsam: the fragrance ever suggested the fir in the next room.

Elizabeth went first to the mantel, and putting one little freckled hand on the Parian marble, and a little freckled (perhaps) foot on the brass fender, and pressing her side against the Bacchic grapes (which might well have become purpling at the moment), she opened the clock and looked in. The clock key was there, and Elizabeth was used to see her mother take it out for the winding of the hours—always the winding of the hours, the winding of the years, the winding of life.

Next she went to another window where the geraniums were blooming, and looked on the sill: these geraniums were her mother's especial care, as everything in the house was her especial care; and Elizabeth had often watched her pouring water on the budding green of the plants as though the drops were bright tears: once she believed the bright drops were tears.

Then she passed on to the locked connecting doors between the library and the parlor, sniffing as she drew near the odor of the fir—sniffing it with sensitive nostril as a fawn on some wild mountain-side questions the breeze blowing from beds of inaccessible herbage. Every spring when the parlor was locked for cleaning and when children's feet and fingers must be kept from wet paint, she was used to see her mother lock these doors and lay the key along the edge of the carpet. It was not there now, however.

Then Elizabeth looked in one more place.