Somehow, the longer I live, the less sense I seem to have. There’s some things I’ve learned from twenty-five to thirty times in my life, and yet I can’t seem to remember them no more than I can remember whether it’s sulphite or sulphate of soda that I take for my quinsy. And one of these is about taking things casual.
That night, for instance, when I come round the corner on to Daphne Street at half-past seven on Christmas Eve, I thought I was going to have to waste a minute or two standing just where the bill-board makes a shadow for the arc-light, trying to get used to the idea of what we were doing—used to it in my throat. But there wasn’t much time to spend that way, being there were things to do between then and eight o’clock, when we’d told ’em all to be there. So I ran along and tried not to think about it—except the work part. ’Most always, the work part of anything’ll steady you.
The great cedar-of-Lebanon-looking tree, standing down there on the edge of the Market Square and acting as if it had been left from some long-ago forest, on purpose, had been hung round with lines and lines of strung pop-corn—the kind that no Christmas tree would be a Christmas tree without, because so many, many folks has set up stringing it nights of Christmas week, after the children was in bed, and has kept it, careful, in a box, so’s it’d do for next year. We had all that from the churches—Methodist and Presbyterian and Episcopal and Baptist and Catholic pop-corn, and you couldn’t tell ’em apart at all when you got ’em on the tree. The festoons showed ghostly-white in the dark and the folks showed ghostly-black, hurrying back and forth doing the last things.
And the folks was coming—you could hear ’em all along Daphne Street, tripping on the bad place that hadn’t been mended because it was right under the arc-light, and coming over the hollow-sounding place by Graham’s drug-store, and coming from the little side streets and the dark back streets and the streets down on the flats. Some of ’em had Christmas trees waiting at home—the load had been there on the Market Square, just like we had let it be there for years without seeing that the Market Square had any other Christmas uses—and a good many had bought trees. But a good many more had decided not to have any—only just to hang up stockings; and to let the great big common Christmas tree stand for what it stood for, gathering most of that little garland of Daphne Street trees up into its living heart.
Over by the bandstand I come on them I’d been looking for—Eddie Newhaven and Arthur Mills and Lily Dorron and Sarah and Mollie and the Cartwrights and Lifty and six-eight more.
“Hello, folks,” I says. “What you down here for? Why ain’t you home?”
They answered all together:
“For the big tree!”
“Are you, now?” I says—just to keep on a-talking to ’em. “Whose tree?”
I love to remember the way they answered. It was Eddie Newhaven that said it.