Neighborhood Stories

“Well, Stubby,” says Mis’ Holcomb, kind, “yes, I’ll be obliged for a lift, if not a lug. You well?” she asks.

“Yes’m,” says Stubby, acting green, like a boy will when you ask after his health.

He picked up her suit-case and moved over toward the line. It was an awful long line that night, that reached ’way around past the public desk. In ahead of us was ’most everybody we knew – Abigail Arnold and Mis’ Merriman and Libby Liberty and old rich Mis’ Wiswell with a bag of packages looking like they might be jewelry, every one. And every one of them was talking as hard as they could about the Christmas things they couldn’t get done.

“Might as well settle down for a good visit while we’re waiting,” I says to Mis’ Holcomb, and she made her eyebrows sympathize.

No sooner was we stood up, neat and in line, than in come three folks that was total strangers to me and to the village as well. One was a young girl around twenty, with eyes kind of laughing at everything, dressed in blue, with ermine on her hat and an ermine muff as big as one of my spare-room pillows, and three big fresh pink roses on her coat. And one was a youngish fellow, some older than her, in a gray cap, and having no use of his eyes – being they were kept right close on the lady in blue. And the other, I judged, was her father – a nice, jolly, private Santa Claus, in a fur-lined coat. They were in a tearing hurry to get to the general-delivery window, but when they saw the line, and how there was only one window for mail and stamps and all, they fell in behind us, as nice as we was ourselves.

“Let me take you out and you wait in the car, Alison,” says the youngish man, anxious.

“Hadn’t you better, dear?” says her father, careful.

“Why, but I love this!” she says. “Isn’t it quaint?” And she laughed again.

Now, I hate that word quaint. So does Mis’ Holcomb. It always sounds to us like last year’s styles. So though her and I had been looking at the three strangers – that we saw were merely passing through in an automobile, like the whole country seems to – with some interest, we both turned our backs and went on visiting and listening to the rest.

“I’ve got three more to get presents for,” says Mis’ Merriman in that before-Christmas conversation that everybody takes a hand at, “and what to get them I do not know. Don’t you ever get up a stump about presents?”

“Stump!” says Libby Liberty, “I live on a stump from the time I start till I stick on the last stamp.”

“I’ve got two more on my list,” Mis’ Wiswell says, worried, “and it don’t seem as if I could take another stitch nor buy another spoon, hat-pin or paper-knife. But I know they’ll send me something, both of them.”

I stood looking at us, tired to death with what we’d been a-making, but sending ’em off with a real lot of love and satisfaction wrapped up in ’em, too. And I thought how we covered up Christmas so deep with work that we hardly ever had time to get at the real Christmas down underneath all the stitches. And yet, there we were, having dropped everything else that we were doing, just because it was Christmas week, and coming from all over town with little things we had made, and standing there in line to send ’em off to folks. And I thought of all the other folks in all the other post-offices in the world, doing the self-same thing that night. And I felt all kind of nice and glowing to think I was one of ’em. Only I did begin to wish we were enough civilized to get the glow some other way.

“I guess it’s going to take a long time,” says Mis’ Holcomb, patient. “Stubby, you needn’t wait if you’ve anything else to do.”

“Oh,” says Stubby, important, “I’ve got a present to mail.”

A present to mail! When Sodality had been feeding him for five weeks among us!

Mis’ Holcomb and I exchanged our next two glances.

“What is it, Stubby?” asks Mis’ Holcomb, that is some direct by nature and never denies herself at it.

He looked up kind of shy – he’s a nice little boy, when anybody has any time to pay any attention to him.

“It’s just this,” he said, and took it out from under his coat. It was about as big as a candy box, and he’d wrapped it up himself, and the string was so loose and the paper was so tore that they weren’t going to stay by each other past two stations.

“Mercy!” says Mis’ Holcomb, “leave me tie it up for you.”

She took it. And in order to tie it she had to untie it. And when she done that, what was in it come all untied. And she see, and we both of us see, what was in it. It was a great big pink rose, fresh and real, with a lot of soaking wet paper wrapped round the stem.

“Stubby Mosher!” says Mis’ Holcomb straight out, “where’d you get this?”

He colored up. “I bought it to the greenhouse,” he says. “I’m a-goin’ to shovel paths till the first of March to pay for it. And they gimme one path ahead for postage.”

“Who you sending it to?” says Mis’ Holcomb, blunt – and I kind of wished she wouldn’t, because the folks right round us was beginning to listen.

“To mother,” says Stubby.

Mis’ Holcomb near dropped the box. “My land!” she said, “why didn’t you take it to her? You’re goin’ to-morrow to spend Christmas with her, ain’t you?”

Stubby shook his head and swallowed some.

“I ain’t going,” he told her.

“Ain’t going!” Mis’ Holcomb says. “Why ain’t you goin’, I’d like to know, when you was promised?”

“My brother wrote he can’t,” said Stubby. “He’s had some money to pay. He can’t send me. I – ”

He stopped, and looked down on the floor as hard as ever he could, and swallowed like lightning.

“Well, but that’s how we got her to go there,” Mis’ Holcomb says. “We promised her you’d come.”

“My brother wrote he can’t.” Stubby said it over.

Mis’ Holcomb looked at me for just one minute. Then her thoughts took shape in her head, and out.

“How much money has Sodality got in the treasury?” she says to me.

“Forty-six cents,” says I, that’s treasurer and drove to death for a fund for us.

“How much is the fare to Wooster?”

“Three fifty-five each way,” says Stubby, ready, but hopeless.

“My land!” says Mis’ Holcomb, “they ain’t a woman in Sodality that can afford the seven dollars – nor a man in the town’ll see it like we do. And no time to raise nothing. And that poor woman off there…”

She stared out over the crowd, kind of wild.

The line was edging along up to the window, and still talking about it.

“…Elsie and Mame that I haven’t sent a thing to,” Mis’ Merriman was saying. “I just must get out and find something to-morrow, if it does get there late. But I’m sure I donno what…”

“…disappointed me last minute on two Irish crochet collars,” Mis’ Wiswell was holding forth, in her voice that talks like her vocal cords had gone flat, same as car-wheels.

“I’ve got company coming to-morrow, and I just simply will have to let both presents go, if I stay awake all night about it, as stay awake I s’pose I shall.”

Mis’ Holcomb looked over at me steady for a minute, like she’d see a thing she couldn’t name. Then she kind of give it up, and went on tying Stubby’s package. And just then she see what he’d wrote for a Christmas card. It was on a piece of wrapping-paper, and it said:

TO MY MOTHER

I CANT COM

MERY CRISMAS

STUB