THE RED CANDLE
It was so cold that the world seemed as stiff and stark as a poet's hell. A little moon was frozen against a pallid sky. The old dark houses with their towers and gables wore the rigid look of iron edifices. The saint over the church door at the corner had an icicle on his nose. Even the street lights shone faint and benumbed through clouded glass.
Ostrander, with his blood like ice within his veins, yearned for a Scriptural purgatory with red fire and flame. To be warm would be heaven. It was a wise old Dante who had made hell cold!
As he crossed the threshold of his filthy tenement he felt for the first time a sense of its shelter. Within its walls there was something that approached warmth, and in his room at the top there was a bed with a blanket.
Making his way toward the bed and its promise of comfort, he was stopped on the second stairway by a voice which came out of the dark.
"Mr. Tony, you didn't see our tree."
Peering down, he answered the voice: "I was going up to get warm."
"Milly said to tell you that we had a fire."
"A real fire, Pussy? I didn't know that there was one in the world."
He came down again to the first floor. Pussy was waiting--a freckled dot of a child tied up in a man's coat.
The fire was in a small round stove. On top of the stove something was boiling. The room was neat but bare, the stove, a table, and three chairs its only furnishing. In a room beyond were two beds covered with patchwork quilts.
On the table was a tree. It was a Christmas tree--just a branch of pine and some cheap spangly things. The mother of the children sewed all day and late into the night. She had worked a little longer each night for a month that the children might have the tree.
There was no light in the room but that of a small and smoky lamp.
Milly spoke of it. "We ought to have candles."
Ostrander, shrugged close to the stove, with his hands out to its heat, knew that they ought to have electric lights, colored ones, a hundred perhaps, and a tree that touched the stars!
But he said: "When I go out I'll bring you a red candle--a long one--and we'll put it on the shelf over the table."
Milly, who was resting her tired young body in a big rocker with the baby in her arms, asked: "Can we put it in a bottle or stand it in a cup? We haven't any candlestick."
"We can do better than that," he told her, "with a saucer turned upside down and covered with salt to look like snow."
Pussy, economically anxious, asked, "Can we eat the salt afterward?"
"Of course."
"Then, may we do it, Milly?"
"Darling, yes. How nice you always fix things, Mr. Tony!"
Long before he had known them he had fixed things--things which would have turned this poor room into an Aladdin's palace. There was that Christmas Eve at the Daltons'. It had been his idea to light the great hall with a thousand candles when they brought in the Yule log, and to throw perfumed fagots on the fire.
He came back to the round stove and the tiny tree. "I like to fix things," he said. "Once upon a time--"
They leaned forward eagerly to this opening.
"Of course you know it isn't true," he prefaced.
"Of course it couldn't be true"--Pussy was reassuringly sceptical--"the things that you tell us couldn't really happen--ever--"
"Well, once upon a time, there was a tree in a great house by a great river, and it was set in a great room with squares of black-and-white marble for a floor, and with a fountain with goldfish swimming in its basin, and there were red-and-blue parrots on perches, and orange-trees in porcelain pots, and the tree itself wasn't a pine-tree or a fir or a cedar; it was a queer round, clipped thing of yew, and it had red and blue and orange balls on it, and in the place of a wax angel on top there was a golden Buddha, and there were no candles--but the light shone out and out of it, like the light shines from the moon."
"Was it a Christmas tree?" Pussy asked, as he paused.
"Yes, but the people who trimmed it and the ones who came to see it didn't believe in the Wise Men, or the Babe in the Manger, or the shepherds who watched their flocks by night--they just worshiped beauty and art--and other gods--but it was a corking tree--"
"You use such funny words," Pussy crowed ecstatically. "Who ever heard of a corking tree?"
He smiled at her indulgently. He was warmer now, and as he leaned back in his chair and unbuttoned his coat he seemed to melt suddenly into something that was quite gentlemanly in pose and outline. "Well, it really was a corking tree, Pussy."
"What's a Buddha?" Milly asked, making a young Madonna of herself as she bent over the baby.
"A gentle god that half of the world worships," Ostrander said, "but the people who put him on the tree didn't worship anything--they put him there because he was of gold and ivory and was a lovely thing to look at--"
"Oh," said Pussy, with her mouth round to say it, "oh, how funny you talk, Mr. Tony!" She laughed, with her small hands beating her knees.
She was presently, however, very serious, as she set the table. There was little formality of service. Just three plates and some bread.
Milly, having carried the baby into the other room, was hesitatingly hospitable. "Won't you have supper with us, Mr. Tony?"
He wanted it. There was a savory smell as Milly lifted the pot from the stove. But he knew there would be only three potatoes--one for Pussy and one for Milly and one for the mother who was almost due, and there would be plenty of gravy. How queer it seemed that his mind should dwell on gravy!
"Onions are so high," Milly had said, as she stirred it. "I had to put in just a very little piece."
He declined hastily and got away.
In the hall he met their mother coming in. She was a busy little mother, and she did not approve of Ostrander. She did not approve of any human being who would not work.
"A merry Christmas," he said to her, standing somewhat wistfully above her on the stairs.
She smiled at that. "Oh, Mr. Tony, Mr. Tony, they want a man in the shop. It would be a good way to begin the New Year."
"Dear lady, I have never worked in a shop--and they wouldn't want me after the first minute--"
Her puzzled eyes studied him. "Why wouldn't they want you?"
"I am not--dependable--"
"How old are you?" she asked abruptly.
"Twice your age--"
"Nonsense--"
"Not in years, perhaps--but I have lived--oh, how I have lived--!"
He straightened his shoulders and ran his fingers through his hair. She had a sudden vision of what he might be if shorn of his poverty. There was something debonair--finished--an almost youthful grace--a hint of manner--
She sighed. "Oh, the waste of it!"
"Of what?"
She flamed. "Of you!"
Then she went in and shut the door.
He stood uncertainly in the hall. Then once again he faced the cold.
Around the corner was a shop where he would buy the red candle. The ten cents which he would pay was to have gone for his breakfast. He had sacrificed his supper that he might not go hungry on Christmas morning. He had planned a brace of rolls and a bottle of milk. It had seemed to him that he could face a lean night with the promise of these.
There were no red candles in the shop. There were white ones, but a red candle was a red candle--with a special look of Christmas cheer. He would have no other.
The turn of a second corner brought him to the great square. Usually he avoided it. The blaze of gold on the west side was the club.
A row of motors lined the curb. There was Baxter's limousine and Fenton's French car. He knew them all. He remembered when his own French car had overshadowed Fenton's Ford.
There were wreaths to-night in the club windows, and when Sands opened the doors there was a mass of poinsettia against the hall mirror.
How warm it looked with all that gold and red!
In the basement was the grill. It was a night when one might order something heavy and hot. A planked steak--with deviled oysters at the start and a salad at the end.
And now another motor-car was poking its nose against the curb. And Whiting climbed out, a bear in a big fur coat.
Whiting's car was a closed one. And it would stay there for an hour. Ostrander knew the habits of the man. From the office to the club, and from the club--home. Whiting was methodical to a minute. At seven sharp the doors would open and let him out.
The clock on the post-office tower showed six!
There was a policeman on the east corner, beating his arms against the cold. Ostrander did not beat his arms. He cowered frozenly in the shadow of a big building until the policeman passed on.
Then he darted across the street and into Whiting's car!
Whiting, coming out in forty minutes, found his car gone. Sands, the door man, said that he had noticed nothing. The policeman on the corner had not noticed.
"I usually stay longer," Whiting said, "but to-night I wanted to get home. I have a lot of things for the kids."
"Were the things in your car?" the policeman asked.
"Yes. Toys and all that--"
Ostrander, with his hand on the wheel, his feet on the brakes, slipped through the crowded streets unchallenged. It had been easy to unlock the car. He had learned many things in these later years.