THE CHRISTMAS BISHOP
PART I
Christmas morning, blue-black, pricked with stars against the Bishop’s window panes. Westbury lay asleep beside its curving river, the great old houses with gardens that ran terraced to the bank, the churches, the college, even the new teeming tenements at the bending of the water, all lay asleep in the Christmas dawning. The Bishop alone was awake, and against the darkness before his eyes pictures raced. He had been a poet once, so long ago that when sometimes they sang his hymns in church he had forgotten they were his, but he still kept the poet’s trick of thinking in pictures during those strangely alert moments between sleep and full awakening. The pictures fell into the march of a poem.
It was a storied city built upon two hills cleft by a valley. On the twin crests towered great palaces and a temple. Where the hills sank toward the north, there were terraced streets and narrow climbing byways. There were markets and booths and all the signs of multitudinous life, but throughout all the place one heard no sound, saw nothing that moved, yet one knew that the whole city throbbed with the pulse-beats of innumerable homes. A gray pall hung low, as if the abrupt Oriental dawn had been arrested; the gray dimmed the marble of the palaces, and dulled the temple gold. In the silent gloom one waited.
One did not know whence he had come, the Child who was suddenly there, in the streets of that city without stars, a sacred city once; but wherever he knocked upon the portal, quickly all within woke to life, and became a teeming, bustling household; again, when he withdrew, all was once more silence and darkness.
He was a tiny child, barefoot and pale, some little lost waif from the mountains who had come seeking his kinsfolk among the homes. So fast he pattered over the pavement that his pale hair and his white tunic streamed upon the wind. His little yearning hands stretched out showed fair as a baby’s in that wintry twilight. Ever and again he knocked and entered, and always, entering, his face flamed with hope, and always, coming forth, he was sobbing, for he found no welcome.
On and on he went, while each black street along which he hurried was stabbed ever and again by the opening and shutting of a ruddy door. In the silence one heard it plain, the heavy sound of a door that closed because it did not know him. At length he had passed the city portals and was mounting the hill-slope that is Golgotha, a form all pale upon the dark, blown hair and robe and pattering feet. There the Child turned, for it seemed he was the little Prince of that city, and all the folk his kin. Rising a-tiptoe he stretched out his hands, cross-wise, to them in love, and suddenly the sun, withheld, leaped kingly above the hills beyond Jordan, and the silent air was full of wings and of voices, the chant of the Christmas angels singing home the Homeless One, and in that flood of light and song all that city knew the Child they had lost their own, forever.
Slowly, before the Bishop’s eyes, that gold radiance dimmed into the bleak gray twilight that was stealing over his room. Sharp as life shall strike at visions came a sound from below that struck the dreamy smile from his lips, leaving a twitching pain; certain sounds had that power of intolerable renewal. A homely enough sound, merely the thud of a lid dropped upon a flour bin, but it seemed now to be a flour bin in a doll-house pantry in their first Rectory, his and Annie’s. He would seek her there before going out to his parish calls. She would be standing with her back to him, hands deep in dough, and would turn to him her cheek, olive that always went rose beneath his kiss. He could still hear the catch of her breath as she whispered good-by, for Annie, deeply joyous, had yet always treated joy a little apprehensively, as if knowing it would not last so very long. Looking back over many years, the Bishop thought how young Annie had been when she died, and Nan had been younger still. Nan! There it was again! That flash of hot pain through his head, followed by a numbing dullness, even stranger to bear. He had felt this several times of late. The Bishop ran a hand over his forehead. He seemed to be floating far, without thought, yet this was not sleep. Slowly, slowly, he drew back, but his thoughts were heavy, not clear. He seemed to lie there waiting, waiting for something. Surely thus he had always waited on Christmas morning. He listened. It would come in a moment. There! A scurry along the hall, the clatter of the door-handle, a rush, a jump, curls, lips, bubbling chuckles, little cold toes to be warmed in his hand! Hear the shouts and the singing of her, feel the pummelling of her little hands!
“Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!” shrilling straight up to the angels! Was she not Christmas joy turned mad, his little girl!
He was full awake now. His lips formed a word. We are very weary of old pain repeated when we whisper out to God like that.