The Gay Cockade
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.
It was several minutes before he was aware of faint fragrances--warm
tropical fragrances of flowers and fruits and spices--Christmas
fragrances which sent him back to the great kitchen where his
grandmother's servants had baked and brewed.
He stopped the car and touched a button. The light showed booty. He had
not expected this. He had wanted the car for an hour, to feel the thrill
of it under his fingers, to taste again the luxury of its warmth and
softness. He had meant to take it back unharmed--with nothing more than
the restless ghost of his poor desires to haunt Whiting when again he
entered it.
But now here were toys and things which Whiting, in a climax of
generosity, had culled from bake-shop and grocer, from flower-shop,
fruit-shop, and confectioner.
He snapped out the light and drove on. He had still a half-hour for his
adventure.
It took just three of the thirty minutes to slide up to the curb in
front of the tall tenement. He made three trips in and up to the top
floor. He risked much, but Fate was with him and he met no one.
Fate was with him, too, when he left the car at a corner near the club,
and slipped out of it like a shadow, and thence like a shadow back to
the shop whence his steps had tended before his adventures.
When he returned to the tall tenement the small family on the first
floor had finished supper, and the mother had gone back to work. The
baby was asleep. Milly and Pussy, wrapped up to their ears, were hugging
the waning warmth of the little stove.
"Mr. Tony, did you get the candle?" Pussy asked as he came in.
"Yes. But I've been thinking"--his manner was mysterious--"I don't want
to put it on the shelf. I want it in the window--to shine out--"
"To shine out--why?"
"Well, you know, there's St. Nicholas."
"Oh--"
"He ought to come here, Pussy. Why shouldn't he come here? Why should he
go up-town and up-town, and take all the things to children who have
more than they want?"
Milly was philosophic. "St. Nicholas is fathers and mothers--"
But Pussy was not so sure. "Do you think he'd come--if we did? Do you
really and truly think he would?"
"I think he might--"
The candle set in the window made a fine show from the street. They all
went out to look at it. Coming in, they sat around the stove together.
Pussy drew her chair very close to Ostrander. She laid her hand on his
knee. It was a little hand with short, fat fingers. In spite of lean
living, Pussy had managed to keep fat. She was adorably dimpled.
Ostrander, looking down at the fat little hand, began: "Once upon a
time--there was a doll--a Fluffy Ruffles doll, in a rosy gown--"
"Oh!" Pussy beat the small, fat hand upon his knee.
"And pink slippers--and it traveled miles to find some one to--love it.
And at last it said to St. Nicholas, 'Oh, dear St. Nick, I want to find
a little girl who hasn't any doll--'"
"Like me?" said Pussy.
"Like you--"
"And St. Nicholas said, 'Will you keep your pink slippers clean and
your nice pink frock clean if I give you to a poor little girl?' and the
Fluffy Ruffles doll said 'Yes,' so St. Nicholas looked and looked for a
poor little girl, and at last he came to a window--with a red candle--"
The fat little hand was still and Pussy was breathing hard.
"With a red candle, and there was a little girl who--didn't have any
doll--"
Pussy threw herself on him bodily. "Is it true? Is it true?" she
shrieked.
Milly, a little flushed and excited by the story, tried to say sedately:
"Of course it isn't true. It couldn't be--true--"
"Let's wish it to be true--" Ostrander said, "all three of us, with our
eyes shut--"
With this ceremony completed the little girls were advised gravely to go
to bed. "If Fluffy Ruffles and old St. Nick come by and find you up they
won't stop--"
"Won't they?"
"Of course not. You must shut the door and creep under your quilt and
cover up your head, and if you hear a noise you mustn't look."
Milly eyed him dubiously. "I think it is a shame to tell Pussy such--"
"Corking things?" He lifted her chin with a light finger and looked into
her innocent eyes. "Oh, Milly, Milly, once upon a time there was a
Princess, with eyes like yours, and she lived in a garden where black
swans swam on a pool, and she wore pale-green gowns and there were
poppies in the garden. And a Fool loved her. But she shut him out of the
garden. He wasn't good enough even to kneel at her feet, so she shut him
out and married a Prince with a white feather in his cap."
He had a chuckling sense of Whiting as the white-feathered Prince. But
Milly's eyes were clouded. "I don't like to think that she shut the poor
Fool out of the garden."
For a moment he cupped her troubled face in his two hands. "You dear
kiddie." Then as he turned away he found his own eyes wet.
As he started up-stairs Pussy peeped out at him.
"Wouldn't it be--corking--to see a Fluffy Ruffles doll--a-walking up the
street?"
In a beautiful box up-stairs the Fluffy Ruffles doll stared at him. She
was as lovely as a dream, and as expensive as they make 'em. There was
another doll in blue, also as expensive, also as lovely. Ostrander could
see Milly with the blue doll matching her eyes.
There were toys, too, for the baby. And there was a bunch of violets.
And boxes of candy. And books. And there were things to eat. Besides the
fruits a great cake, and a basket of marmalades and jellies and
gold-sealed bottles and meat pastes in china jars, and imported things
in glass, and biscuits in tins.
Ostrander, after some consideration, opened the tin of biscuits and,
munching, he wrote a note. Having no paper, he tore a wrapper from one
of the boxes. He had the stub of a pencil, and the result was a scrawl.
"MY DEAR WHITING:
"It was I who borrowed your car--and who ran away with your junk. I
am putting my address at the head of this, so that if you want it
back you can come and get it. But perhaps you won't want it back.
"I have a feeling that to you and your wife I am as good as dead.
If you have any thought of me it is, I am sure, to pity me. Yet I
rather fancy that you needn't. I am down and out, and living on ten