Martie, the Unconquered

by Kathleen Thompson Norris

"Christmas day after to-morrow!" she said to Fanny, "don't you love Christmas?"

But she knew that her real Christmas joy had come to-day.

The December kitchen was gas-lighted long before she got there, and Pauline was deep in calm preparation for dinner. Pauline was a Canadian girl, and if her work ever confused or fatigued her, at least she never betrayed the fact. There never were pots and pans awaiting cleaning in Pauline's sink, there never was a teaspoonful of flour spilled upon her biscuit board. Her gingham cuffs were always starched and stiff, her colourless hair smooth. She was a silent, dun-coloured creature, whose most violent expression was an occasional deep, unctuous laugh at Mrs. Bannister's nonsense.

Pauline did not prepare a meal in a series of culminating convulsions, with hair rumpling, face reddening, and voice rising every passing minute. She moved a shining pot forward on a shining stove, she took plates of inviting cold things from the safe, and lifted a damp napkin from her pats of butter. Then she said, in an uninterested voice: "You might tell your p'pa, Miss Lydia—"

Humble as her business was, she had been taught it well. Martie, insatiable on this particular topic, sometimes questioned Pauline. She was given a meagre picture of a farmhouse on Prince Edward's Island, of a stern, exacting, loving mother who "licked" daughters and sons alike with a "trace-end" for any infractions of domestic rule. Of snows so lasting and deep that housewives buried their brown linens in October, and found them again, snowy white, on the April grass. Pauline's mother, dying of "a shock," had been the devoted daughter's charge for eleven hard years, then Pauline had married at thirty, only to be made a widow, by a lumber jam, at thirty-two. So it was fortunate that she could cook, for she was a plain woman, and what the country folk call "dumb," meaning dull, and unresponsive, and unambitious.

To-night there was a little unusual clutter in the big, hot, clean kitchen; Lydia was making sandwiches for the Girls' Sodality Christmas Tree at the large table. Two or three empty cardboard boxes stood waiting the neatly trimmed and pressed bread: Lydia did this sort of thing perfectly. At the end of the table, his cheeks glowing, and his dark mop in a tumble, Teddy was watching in deep fascination.

The room had the charm that use and simplicity lend to any room. There was nothing superfluous here, and nothing assumed. Martie knew every crack in the yellow bowl that held a crinkled rice-pudding; the broom had held that corner for thirty years; for thirty years the roller towel had dangled from that door. She and Len and Sally had seen their mother go to the broom for a straw, to test baking cake, a hundred times; their sticky little faces had been dried a hundred times on the towel.

But to-night a new, homely sweetness seemed to permeate the place. Martie had left the slim, dark-blue book upstairs in her bureau drawer, but her mood of exquisite lightheartedness she had not laid aside. She sat down in the kitchen rocker, and Teddy climbed into her lap, and, while she talked with Lydia, distracted her with little kisses, with small hands squeezing her cold cheeks, and with the casual bumping of his hard little head against her face.

"I declare it begins to feel Christmassy, Lyd! Did you get down town to see the stores? I never saw anything like Bonestell's in my life. It's cold, too—but sort of bracing cold! We had both the stoves going all day; we had to light the lights at four! It was rather nice, everybody coming in to say 'Merry Christmas!'"

"The children had their closing exercises at school this morning," Lydia contributed, "and afterward Sally and I walked down town, with all the children. She expects Joe to-morrow. She wanted Billy and Jim to get in a nap, so I brought Ted home."