“ ‘And He took a little child and set him in their midst.’ ”
That was all he said. And Chris looked out and smiled happy, and waved his branch off the Christmas tree. Over the whole Market Square there lay a stillness that said things to itself and to us. It said that here was the Family, come home, round the tree, big folks and little, wise and foolish, and all feeling the Christmas spirit in our hearts just like it was our hearts. It said that the Family’s judging Lisbeth Note one way or the other didn’t settle anything, nor neither did our treating her little boy mean or good....
For all of a sudden we were all of us miles deeper into life than that. And we saw how, beyond judgment and even beyond what’s what, is a spirit that has got to come and clutch hold of life before such wrongs, and more wrongs, and all the wrongs that ail us, can stop being. And that spirit will be the spirit that was in our hearts right then. We all knew it together—I think even Mis’ Sykes knew—and we stood there steeped in the knowing. And it was one of the minutes when the thing we’ve made out of living falls clean away, like a husk and a shell, and the Shining Thing inside comes close and says: “This is the way I am if you’ll let me be it.”
Away over on the edge of the Square somebody’s voice, a man’s voice—we never knew who it was—begun singing “Home Again, From a Distant Shore.” And everybody all over took it up soft. And standing there round the Christmas tree in the middle of June, with that little child in our midst, it was as true for us as ever it was on Christmas night, that glory shone around. And we had come Home in more senses than we’d thought, to a place, a Great Place, that was waiting for us.
Pretty soon I slipped away, inside Eppleby’s booth. And there, in all that scarlet bunting, Lisbeth stood, looking and crying, all alone—but crying for being glad.
“Lisbeth, Lisbeth!” I said, “right out there is the way life is—when we can get it uncovered.”
She looked up at me; and I saw the thing in her face that was in the faces of all those in the Square, like believing and like hoping, more than any of us knows how—yet.
“Honest?” she said. “Honest and truly?”
“Honest and truly,” I told her.
And I believe that. And you believe it. If only we can get it said....