“Children, this is our new friend, Mary Christmas,” he said, lifting the latch, and allowing his guest to precede him into the driveway. “Come and speak to her.”
They came forward then with the bows and curtsies which had been, as far back as they could remember, the necessary accompaniment to the reception of all visitors; but they were surprised almost to the point of being startled when this dark stranger with the great eyes bent suddenly and kissed the hands which they gave to her, at the same time murmuring unfamiliar words.
It was just at the moment when Mary Christmas kissed the dimple between the second and third finger of John’s square little hand that Mary Wescott saw something which the others had quite overlooked. There were traces of tears on the brown face of their guest—quite unmistakable, tiny paths, which, dry as they now were, bore certain and tragic proof in their downward course across her smooth cheeks. And as Mary Wescott stared at those barely discernible lines, a singular thing happened to her. She who had seen tears and the traces of them in plenty during her twelve years began to feel suddenly as though she had never really seen them before in all her life. Those dry, white stains on the face of Mary Christmas were doing a strange thing to her, which she did not understand or like at all. They were shutting out all the people about her, her father, John, Roger, Cynthia, even Mary Christmas herself, the sunlight, the drifting petals of apple blossoms, and in their places were trying to show her Things which were not things at all. They were making her dimly aware that the sorrows in the world, the pitiful sufferings of the aged, the bewildering anguish of young people, the broken hearts of little children, are all a part of a great mantle of sorrow that encircles the whole wide earth in its dark, smothering folds. She drew back frightened; but just at that moment her mother, in blue gingham, appeared on the front steps.
Now that blue gingham was a wonder-working fabric. It chased away the Things that Mary Wescott might have seen, and kept her a little girl for a whole year longer. The suddenness of it there on the porch brought back her father and the others, and, in spite of a peculiar clutching at her throat and the entirely absurd idea that she had been away somewhere, made her quite herself again. So when John, suddenly freeing himself from Cynthia’s grasp, ran boldly after Mary Christmas and his father and, to the astonishment of everyone, put his hand in the dark one of the stranger to lead her to his mother, she could follow with Roger and Cynthia, smiling at his unaccustomed friendliness and sharing their eager excitement in each new happening of this most extraordinary occasion.
That dinner and the afternoon hours that followed were memorable ones in Wescott history. Mary Christmas sat at the table in the seat of honor at their father’s right, those disturbing marks of tears quite washed from her face, the red silk handkerchief tied neatly over her dark hair. Appetites languished among the Wescott children; and for once penalties were mercifully withheld from those who could eat no potato. Four pairs of eyes traveled from headdress to gold lacings, from brown cheeks, now flushed with color, to long brown fingers; four pairs of ears strained to detect among the broken, rhythmic fragments of her speech familiar everyday words that they could understand.
Mary Christmas talked not only with her lips. She talked with her brows, her eyes, her hands, her whole body, in a mighty effort to convey by means of harsh, newly found words the story of her life to these, her new friends. Her country lay far across the ocean, across warm inland seas and great sand-swept deserts. It was a high land of tumbling, rockbound red hills and towering, snow-crowned mountains, of broad valleys with streams, of wide, treeless pastures—the homes of thousands of sheep. It was a land of bitter winters and dry, hot summers, thick with dust, which the wind whirled in great storms from the bordering deserts. Against the cold of those winters the people dug their homes in the sloping hillsides, long narrow houses with space for both men and animals, houses roofed with sods and partitioned with stones; and these dwellings were proof also against the hot, parching winds of summer. It was a land over which people had passed for centuries, people of many races, one succeeding another in the march of years, all journeying from the East to the West—hordes of people, sweeping onward with the mercilessness of locusts or of the country’s own burning wind. It was a land where in the spring snow-fed streams glistened on the high mountain-sides and slipped crystal clear through the valleys, with here and there the sound of tiny silver bells. Above all, it was the oldest land in all the world—older than India, than Egypt, than China with her walled towns, older than Jerusalem with Solomon’s Temple, older than the white, ancient cities of Assyria and Babylonia. Its red hills and snowy mountains and wide pastures and clear rivers had been there when Methuselah rounded his nine-hundredth year, and when Enoch took his solemn walk with God.
Mary Christmas loved this land. Even John understood that. When she talked of its clear waters and of its wandering flocks of sheep, a wistfulness haunted her voice like a melody; when she explained to the puzzled children how great bands of people had again and again laid it waste and desolate, numberless years before they were born, the sadness of long centuries burdened her words; when she spoke of its great age, her tones echoed like those of the organ at church, until in one supreme outburst of reverence she rose from her chair, her face uplifted, her arms spread wide after the manner of the ancient prophet in benediction upon his people.
But even as she stood with outstretched arms and glowing face, a change came over her features. The children saw it coming, and the awe in which they had listened, wide-eyed, to her description of this far-off, ancient land gave way to a kind of enchanting anticipation of what might happen next. The sorrowful lines about her mouth hardened until they became almost cruel; her long nose, with the bend in it so peculiarly unlike any that they had seen, widened at the nostrils with the great breaths which she was drawing; the sad yearning which had softened her eyes faded as a candle burns itself out in a dark room, and into the blackness of their depths there came an ominous red gleam. She was no longer a poet, a patriot, or a prophet. She was one who hates, bitterly, relentlessly.
Now her voice rose like the rising wind on the bare plains of her own land.
“I live there. I play—like him—like her—like you all. I chase birds and catch falling blossoms in my hair. Then I grow up. I go to a great city—to Erzerum.” To the listening children this strange word boomed like the sound of the town drum on Memorial Day. “I marry there—a good man. We have two children—a girl, a boy. My husband, he buy silks, laces, jewels, all beautiful from Persia, and sell them. We are happy. Then a year ago—when the blossoms fall—like this—the Turks come. They run through Erzerum—their horses run! They kill—they kill—they kill!”