CHAPTER XII

THE HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS

“It’s always nice when you begin,” said Alys.

The three girl cousins were gathered in Natalie’s room doing up Christmas gifts. Rolls of white tissue paper, of crêpe paper figured in glowing poinsettia and holly; yards and yards of Christmas ribbons, white, with holly or poinsettia designs, or plain holly red; tufts of jewelers’ cotton clinging to everything it should not touch and leaving fuzzy white down behind it when it was removed; Christmas seals of varied designs and Red Cross seals; piles of cards; higher piles of holly boxes of all sorts and sizes; labels asking aimlessly that something should not be “opened until Christmas,” all these things covered the room “except the walls and ceiling,” as Beth had said. She had added that it “was nice when we began,” showing that she was getting a little tired of the work, and Alys had retorted that it is “always nice when you begin.”

Beth had only a few packages to do up; they lay together, completed, and now she was helping her cousins with what looked like their endless task.

“It’s pretty hard to keep up the way you begin in anything,” said Natalie thoughtfully disentangling the end of the last opened piece of poinsettia ribbon from a roll of plain red. “It’s fun getting things around and starting in, but you--one--get--gets so discouraged when things are all around and mixed up!”

“I wouldn’t try to use two pronouns in one sentence, Nat; that is what _I_ call mixed up,” laughed Alys. “Better stick to ‘you,’ if you start with it, even if it isn’t so elegant. Well, all I know is my fingers are turning into chop-sticks; they’re getting all stiff and queer tying these little fiddling bows of narrow ribbon! Wouldn’t it be easy if we could order Christmas presents sent right to the people from the stores?”

“With price tags on and the shopping slip done up with them, instead of a Christmas card?” suggested Natalie. “No, I don’t mind getting tired doing this, because it adds at least as much again to the presents to have them come done up so fascinatingly. I wouldn’t care for mine if they came in brown paper, so I’m willing to work to make Christmas nice. But I’m ready to own up that it’s the hardest job I ever have in the whole year.”

“Mama won’t let us hand it over to any one else to do,” Alys explained to Beth. “She says it isn’t the right idea at all to have the maids do it. I suppose it isn’t.”

“No; I can see that,” said Beth. “It wouldn’t be so hard if we hadn’t got everything out at once. It’s so--crazy!”

“Have to,” said Alys. “Else you’ll find you used your boxes wrong, or used up all one kind of paper that you simply had to have for something else.”

“I’ve got the worst job of all!” said Dirk, coming into the room, followed by his mother. Dirk wrote so plain and good a hand that his share of the Christmas preparations was to address the packages. In return for which the girls did up his gifts for him. It is doubtful if Dirk appreciated this; it would not have troubled him if he had handed each of his boy friends a present, quite unadorned, with the brief remark: “Here; that’s for you!”

“Not anything like through, are you, girls?” asked Mrs. Cortlandt. “Don’t get too tired. If you can’t finish, Natalie may sleep in one of the guest rooms, or with Alys, and you may leave everything as it is when you stop for the day, and resume in the morning at the point you leave off.”

“I wish Natalie would sleep with me!” cried Beth. “My presents are done up, Aunt Alida. That pile, there.”

Aunt Alida had quick vision for shadows on young faces, quick ears for tones in young voices. She thought that she detected wistfulness in Beth’s face and voice then, and rightly interpreted it as a half wish on Beth’s part that she had as many friends to make merry on Christmas as her cousins had. And Aunt Alida never saw anything that she might improve without at once trying to improve it. She had an inspiration now.

“I wonder how it would do for Bethie to have a tree and invite the guests to it?” Mrs. Cortlandt suggested.

“Beth! Why, she doesn’t know----” began Alys and stopped herself.

“No, I don’t know any one but the girls’ friends, the Tanagers and Bluebirds, and those girls,” said Beth, finishing Alys’s sentence for her.

“I don’t mean that sort of a tree, Beth! And you do know one girl whom we don’t know at all--Annunciata Carmaldo, wasn’t she? And Liebchen is rather especially your acquaintance,” said Aunt Alida, smiling down on Beth. “I mean a tree for girls who may not have a Merry Christmas without it. Suppose we have a fine big tree set up in--perhaps the billiard room? And trim it and light it as well as we know how, and let it be Beth’s tree, and let Beth issue the invitations! She can get introductions to poor people through--let me see! I think Anna Mary would help us splendidly; she is exceedingly good and charitable under her glum exterior, and is constantly working for the poor herself. We might let this tree be our only tree this year and for ourselves do something else--a hunt for presents, or something of that sort. What do you all say to giving Beth a Christmas party, a tree for children who need happiness?”

“Fine, beautiful mother!” approved Natalie with a warm look in the dark eyes which smiled at Mrs. Cortlandt.

“Say, wouldn’t that be great! Fun alive!” cried Dirk.

“I think it might be very nice indeed,” said Alys slowly.

Beth had risen, dropping all the Christmas materials which filled her lap.

“Aunt Alida,” she said earnestly, her eyes moist, shining through the rapturous tears, “all my life long I have thought how perfectly beautiful it would be if I could do something like that! You read about it in books, you know, how rich girls have trees, or something, for poor children. I think I’d be so happy I couldn’t bear it to have a tree like that! Do you think they could sing hymns around the tree? I do love hymns, ’specially Christmas ones. It wouldn’t be my tree; it would be all, every bit yours, but if you called it a little bit mine I’d be so glad! It would be so much like Bethlehem, you see.”

“Gee!” exclaimed Dirk too surprised to help it. “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. All the poor shepherds, and bringing poor children in, and--and ‘suffer little children,’ you know,” stammered Beth, too embarrassed to put her thought into coherent words.

Mrs. Cortlandt drew Beth to her and kissed her with great tenderness.

“Little Elizabeth, are you going to be one of those who love, like your namesake, the ‘sweet Saint,’ Elizabeth of Hungary? Dear heart, we will have the tree and if you can give my children some of your sense of the approach to Bethlehem it will be more than a merely Merry Christmas, my precious little niece,” she said softly.

That afternoon the great tree was ordered. It was a beauty, so big that the dealer who sold it had been fearful that it might not find a purchaser.

Suddenly Beth found herself swept into the vortex of rapid, late Christmas preparations on a mammoth scale. Aunt Alida insisted that all possible decisions should be left to Beth.

Beth, at her aunt’s suggestion, asked Anna Mary to help her to select the guests.

“Do I know any poor children, is it, Miss Beth?” cried Anna Mary. “Do I not? Sure they do be no lack of them in a big city! I have a niece that’s a Sister of Charity and there’ll be no trouble whatever in her puttin’ us on the thrack of as many destitute little ones as we want. I myself know five families this minyute which has thirty-five children between ’em, all between three and fourteen years of age. And that’s a good start for us.”

“Thirty-five! Five into thirty-five--that’s seven apiece, Anna Mary! Isn’t that a lot?” cried Beth.

“They’re not divided up just evenly, Miss Beth; one family has nine and one has but four. But sure it is a lot, and more than a lot, for there isn’t enough to take care of the quarter of ’em in a way even plain folks would call takin’ care of ’em,” said Anna Mary with feeling.

“Aunt Alida said about fifty would be right, but she said not to worry if there were one or two children over. She doesn’t want to leave out any we find, who really ought to come, just to keep to a certain number,” Beth explained.

“I’m to go with you and the young ladies to the photographer’s. Miss Natalie arranged it with her mother that we might have a while too long, so we could go to the photographer’s unsuspected by Mrs. Cortlandt. Then you and I are goin’ huntin’ for guests, Miss Beth. Mrs. Cortlandt said I might take you to the children’s homes, if I was sure there’d be no diseases for you to catch,” said Anna Mary.

“I had chicken pox--twice, Anna Mary, and whooping-cough and measles when I was small, and last year I was a sight with mumps, so there can’t be much for me to take. I’ll be ready in half an hour--you said, half an hour, Anna Mary?” asked Beth.

“Half an hour, Miss Beth, if you please. And Miss Natalie said she had picked out what you were to be photographed in; Frieda laid out some frocks for her to choose between, and I have the one in the case our young ladies are takin’. It’s a fine white one, Miss Beth, quite simple, and most suited to you. Miss Natalie has wonderful taste for so young a girl,” added Anna Mary, seeing the question in Beth’s eyes.

Beth found the photographer’s another item in her list of “things that were different.” At home one climbed two steep flights of stairs to get to the photographer’s studio and after this breath-taking feat, one found it a small room, stuffy with mixed odors of chemicals, littered with photographs on sundry tables standing about and with dismaying groups and single enlargements, framed in dark mouldings, standing against the walls.

Here one arose in an elevator to enter a still and tasteful reception room, white with the light of the top floor of a large building, and was shown into a dressing room, quietly sumptuous, where a maid was in attendance, in case the visitor had not brought her own maid to make her ready for the great business of a portrait.

Anna Mary being in attendance upon the three young girls, the “stationary maid,” as Natalie called her, was not required. Anna Mary laid out the three white frocks in which the girls were to be photographed and then dressed them. She shook out Natalie’s abundant hair, her glorious hair, so dark, yet full of warmth, full also of bends and turns and wilfulness. She brought Alys’s pale hair forward where it would show to the best advantage, and brushed Beth’s fine masses of shining gold into a mist that was hard to curb. Then they were ready and went out to take their places before the camera. Here two surprises awaited Beth. One was Dirk who, having steadfastly refused to be one of the party, had altered his mind at the last moment and now appeared in his finest attire, grinning sheepishly.

The other surprise was the photographer who was a woman! It had never occurred to Beth that a woman could do more than take Brownie snap-shots, but this woman proved entirely capable. She posed the group of four skilfully, with the grace and dignity of a portrait by Reynolds. Then she photographed the three Cortlandts together, Beth insisting on a group without her. Then each one separately, till at least a dozen negatives had been made and the artist--for the name rightfully belonged to this photographer--expressed herself satisfied with her results.

“Just one more--you with me, little Cozbeth!” cried Natalie. “I want it as a Christmas present to myself.”

Beth willingly agreed, and for a moment the dark hair and the fair hair blended as the two girls were posed before the camera, Beth’s face upturned to Natalie, Natalie’s handsome head bent downward to the younger girl whom she was beginning to love with a fervor that surprised herself.

“Now we part, Bethlein,” said Natalie, this picture taken. “Alys and I are going to lunch with Hedda Gabbler.”

“With--what is her name?” cried Beth, emerging from the skirt Anna Mary threw over her head.

Natalie laughed. “That’s the name of a play; we call Doris Belmar that because she’s such a talker,” she explained. “You’re going with Anna Mary, slumming. Don’t get stolen, or murdered or anything! Good-bye, Beth.”

“Good-bye,” echoed Beth, and her cousins left her to follow them a few moments later, Dirk having taken himself off with evident relief the instant the last picture of himself had been secured.

“It’s a taxicab we have to use to-day, Miss Beth; your uncle has the small car and your aunt is usin’ the horses, after the young ladies are left at Mrs. Belmar’s.” So saying Anna Mary handed Beth into a cab that they found waiting at the door, and then stepped in herself. She had sent the case containing the frocks home by a messenger.

“I’d just as lief have a taxicab, Anna Mary. I think I like them better,” said Beth as theirs started. “I play I am in a boat and that the crowds are what the books call them, ‘a sea of faces,’ and we go plunging right through the waves. I’m always a dolphin or a mermaid.”

“Well, Miss Beth, it’s not a play that I’d care for, both of them bein’ fishy and I’m not partial to fish, nor to the sea, for I was that sick when I came to America that I never went back, though my youngest brother do be still livin’ near by the city of Cork and I’ve plenty cousins at home in Ireland,” said Anna Mary, with her serious air of superiority. “This is gettin’ over to the poor parts, Miss Beth, which so far you’ve not seen,” she added.

The cab was going eastward and then northward. “First we shall find that little Italian girl you saw in the park,” explained Anna Mary.

Beth murmured an assent, but she was too much occupied with the new scenes before her to do more. Rapidly the New York she knew was changing into something as different from itself as her old home was different from it. Shabbiness was creeping over it like a sort of cloudy twilight. The buildings looked battered; so did the people passing them, and swarms of children, who were too small to go to school and too small to play on the sidewalk, were nevertheless playing there in every block.

“It’s here,” announced Anna Mary when the cab stopped. She helped Beth out, gathered up her skirts and gingerly led the way into a tenement house.

“Try not to touch the railin’, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary, mounting the stairs.

Anna Mary knocked at a door which proved to be the right one. It was opened by a woman dressed in bright colors, gold hoops in her ears; a black-eyed baby, held against her shoulder, frowned timidly at the sight of strangers.

The woman seemed to speak little English, but to understand perfectly what Anna Mary said when she explained slowly, in carefully chosen words, that Beth was the little girl who had been the means of saving Annunciata from arrest as a thief and that Annunciata was to come on Christmas eve to a tree at Beth’s home. Anna Mary laid down a card that bore Mr. Cortlandt’s name and address, explaining that this was to tell Annunciata where to go.

“Ye-es, a-tanka you. I not speeka, Annunciata speeka. I un’erstan’, no speeka, me. Annunciata glada go see. Lika lil’ lady moocha, say great times tanka she. Annunciata coma sure--sure!” said the woman with a smile that revealed two rows of gleaming white teeth.

Beth smiled her best to supply deficiencies in the conversation, but the room looked dreary to her, though it was not half as bad as those she was to see later. Some attempt at decking it had been made. A bright lithograph of Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia hung on one side of the room, on the other another high colored lithograph of the crucifixion. Paper flowers and a decorated candle stood on a shelf beside the first picture; there was something besides mere eating and drinking and their scarcity here, but poverty was written plain on the room. Beth felt a shocked pity, as if New York, which had been so abundantly kind to her, was not hospitable to these emigrants.

She followed Anna Mary back to the cab and peered thoughtfully out over its doors as they went on, through various streets. They stopped when Anna Mary, consulting a list given her by her niece, the Sister of Charity, indicated that they should stop, and, getting out, climbed dark stairways, to wind through darker passages, filled with indescribable odors that had the effect of having been there for ages, and entered homes that consisted of two or three stuffy, forlorn little rooms, sometimes of but one room. The pleasure that Beth had imagined they should confer was rarely shown. The children might be glad later on, but the mothers to whom they announced the Christmas tree took it stolidly, sometimes almost suspiciously. It did not seem to make them glad.

After a while this pilgrimage led Beth, with Anna Mary, to the five families of which Anna Mary had told Beth, the five with thirty-five children among them. None of the others had been as poor. They lived on one floor. There was little light in their rooms, but this may have been a good thing, for there was too much revealed by what light there was, too much and too little. There was no adornment here, only the least furniture, and yet hardly any space. But the worst was that the mothers looked so pitifully thin and worn, so dull-eyed and gray of skin. Beth noticed with surprise that Anna Mary’s forbidding manner fell from her like a shell which her heart had pierced, that she was soft of voice, tender of touch, mild-eyed and very, very gentle in these barren places; altogether a new and lovely Anna Mary.

“It’s goodness!” thought Beth correctly. “It’s goodness and kindness and it must be there all the time! She’s a dear and she must come here often, for they know her so well! So she’s not just Anna Mary, who is a maid that looks as if she wore taffeta inside and out; she’s a good, good woman!”

And this was an important discovery, not merely because it set Anna Mary in her true light, but because it showed Beth that goodness was the one real thing that counted.

At last the visits were all made and Anna Mary put Beth into the taxicab for the return home. It was a quiet Beth that looked out over the infolded cab doors with her big, gray-blue eyes, seeing the melancholy streets through which they were passing as part of the poverty which she had, for the first time, realized to be a fact.

Anna Mary watched her, unseen, and finally aroused her from her thoughts.

“Is it plannin’ the tree you are, Miss Beth, that you’re so quiet?” she asked, though she knew Beth was not thinking of the tree.

Beth turned to her with a long, indrawn breath.

“No, Anna Mary. It doesn’t seem as though there could be trees,” she said. “Is it like this all the time? And in all those houses we didn’t go into?”

“Maybe it was too hard on you seein’ it, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary sympathetically.

“But New York isn’t all splendid and happy, then,” said Beth. “I thought it was a fairy-land.”

“There do be bad fairies, Miss Beth. All big cities have the two sides to ’em, the grand side where people spend money like water, and the awful side where even water is scarce. Then there’s a fine lot between; people workin’ hard, but gettin’ good times out of it and nice, comfortable little homes. I think your Aunt Alida wanted to learn what you’d make out of seein’ these miseries,” said Anna Mary.

“Can we help it?” asked Beth. “I never can, because I shall not be rich myself, but can any one?”

“It’s a great puzzle, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary. “No end of things there are makin’ and keepin’ these people poor. The wisest and best heads in the world are always puzzlin’ over helpin’ it, and by this and by that they’re always thinkin’ they’ve found the cure, but it’s not so easy. Sure, you can help it, Miss Beth. Helpin’s not curin’, but if every one helped, then the cure’d be worked. And as to your bein’ poor, do you imagine your aunt and uncle, havin’ found you and found you what you are, lovin’ you as they do, won’t take care you have plenty to help with, if you’re minded to use it that way?”

“Will they?” cried Beth, plainly not thinking of this in connection with her own life. “How shall I help?”

“First off it needs wantin’ to, Miss Beth, real wantin’, so other things don’t crowd it out. And then it takes lovin’, lovin’ in the right way, so you don’t mind when the poor unfortunate people disappoint you and are ungrateful, or turn out ill. Then the way can’t be missed. It’s much the kind of lovin’ that was shown all His life long by our dear Lord, whose birthday you’re goin’ to make glad for the children you’ve been askin’. And the only way I know to help the people is His way; just go about teachin’ and feedin’ and maybe dyin’ for ’em, if needs be, prayin’ they be forgiven for they know not what they do.” Anna Mary spoke with profound emotion in her usually dull voice. Her face warmed and quivered with feeling and Beth sat looking up at her, drinking in her words, her own sweet little face responsive to the chords Anna Mary touched, her eyes dimming with tears, yet kindling with her inward resolve to help in this way, if the opportunity came to her.

Beth put her hand over the back of Anna Mary’s when she stopped speaking.

“I’m glad I came with you to-day, Anna Mary. I think you have shown me better than even Aunt Alida could; you seem to know closer, if that’s the right way to say it. And I’m glad you are the one that came for me, to fetch me from Aunt Rebecca’s here. Maybe it means that some day I can help and you are going to show me how and were sent to fetch me for that reason, only no one knew it then,” she said in her earnest way.

“Bless the dear child!” said Anna Mary fervently. “Sure, Miss Beth, I’ve loved you from the first minyute I set my two eyes on you! Now don’t be thinkin’ sober thoughts so near Christmas and you but a slip of a girl! All you must think of now, dear little Miss Beth, is that you’re going to make fifty-three of these poor children perfectly happy at the tree; we’ve asked fifty-three, Miss Beth!”

“Isn’t it splendid!” cried Beth, brightening. “But is it right to forget, Anna Mary?”

“It wouldn’t be, if broodin’ over poverty did any good, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary sensibly. “But worryin’ never did, nor ever will help anything; more by token it works the other way, makin’ the worrier no good when the time does come to help. It’s plain now you’re meant to be a happy little girl, enjoyin’ what’s sent you with a grateful heart. It’s a mystery, Miss Beth, that one has and the other hasn’t, but so ’tis! The way I look at it is that God is a weaver, weavin’ our lives and all the world, and not one of us sees the pattern He’s set. But if we’re a gold thread in it, then we must let Him use us like pure shinin’ gold in the pattern. And if we’re just a bit of gray wool, or maybe cotton, we must let Him weave us in just as satisfied. Sure, when it’s all made and done with, what difference will it be whether we’re less or more?”

“Oh, Anna Mary, what a lovely, lovely little sermon!” cried Beth.

“I didn’t get the weavin’ idea out of my own head, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary honestly. “But it’s been a great comfort to me since first I saw it in a bit of po’try.”

Beth ran up the steps of her uncle’s house, her seriousness dispelled by the last part of her drive. The gay splendor of the avenue late in the afternoon, the line of prancing horses and beautiful private motor cars, coming back from the park, the promenaders, the children so perfectly dressed, so rosy, so well-tended, swinging and pulling along on their uniformed attendants’ hands, who could believe that this city was the other side of the one Beth had just left and who, at eleven years old, could, or should, resist its brightness?

“Say, Beth, the tree’s come!” cried Dirk from somewhere up-stairs the moment Beth was admitted. He slid down the banisters and came up like an acrobat, with a bow before her. “They’ve set the tree up in the music room. Mama decided we’d need the organ and piano and things; she’s had canvas laid to save the floor. That oak floor’s her joy. But maybe it isn’t a tree! Well, I guess! Come on and see it before you go up-stairs. How many poor kids did you catch?”

“Fifty-three. We couldn’t possibly leave out any, and Aunt Alida said not to mind if there were a few over fifty,” said Beth, following Dirk. “Dirk, it’s exactly like the parable, going out into the highways and byways, you know, to make them come in to the feast.”

“Well, wouldn’t you think they’d fall all over themselves to come? Ought not to take any making, ought it? How’s that? Isn’t that a peach of a tree?” added Dirk, throwing open the music room door with a flourish.

“I never, never saw such a tree--except growing,” cried Beth in a rapture, but tempering her statement to the exact truth. “Dirk, let’s play we are Druids, going to be converted on Christmas, but Druids now. And let’s pay it homage. Big evergreen trees always make me want to worship them!”

“How would you do it, play Druid?” asked Dirk, interested, but at sea.

“I don’t know; let’s sing ‘O Tannenbaum’!” suggested Beth. So taking hands they sang the beautiful German song to the pine tree, though Dirk could not carry a tune well, and Beth’s German went no farther than the first stanza, which she had once learned in school.