Gift-Horses

by Ethel Turner

GIFT-HORSES

By ETHEL TURNER

Author of "The Family at Misrule," "John of Daunt," "Laughing Water," "King Anne" etc.

 

"FOR the love of Heaven, Mabel, come to bed! It's twelve o'clock. In another two or three hours those young blighters will be hammering on our door and yelling 'Merry Christmas.'"

"In a minute. This red enamel isn't dry yet, nor the aluminium on the train's wheels."

"Who ever heard of silvered train wheels? Little John will jeer at you."

"Now, don't be so tiresome, Stephen. It has made it like a new train. It was as strong and good as possible. You don't often see trains like this nowadays. It must be ten years since you got it for Ted."

"Not that little train, is it? By George, yes, I remember it as well as if it were yesterday. I'd had my eye on it in a shop window for weeks, but it was fifteen shillings—fifteen shillings seemed an awful price for a kid's toy in those days—and I was afraid I'd have to take one made out of a sardine tin. Then I got a fit of recklessness on Christmas Eve, and I cut out from office and told them to wrap it up. But what on earth are you doing to it? Ted is too old for it now."

"I know that. There it was on top of his clothes cupboard, smothered with dust. I have got all the rust off with emery powder, enamelled the carriages red, and made the wheels beautiful with this aluminium. It will be like a brand-new train for Little John. He wrote on his chimney letter a week ago: 'Trane, Santa, quick.'"

"Did Ted say you could have it?" asked Stephen.

"Ted? Oh, he had forgotten all about it, of course. Imagines it is thrown away by this, I'm sure."

"H'm!" said Stephen. But his thoughts were switched to the past at the reference to the chimney letter, and the sight of the stout little train that he had bought with such joy for his little son, and counted it as nothing that he had gone without tobacco for a month to make up for the deficit in his pocket. That first flush of fatherhood, how jolly it had been, when there were not so many of the young "blighters," when they were round and soft and solemn-eyed, and believed in a tangible, concrete, and immortal Santa Claus with something of the sweet faith with which they believed in God who twinkled the stars and sent rain to their gardens from His watering-pot.

"Don't you remember, Mab," he said, "the night they hung their pillow-cases at the mantelpiece, and I spread some soot on the hearth and made an imprint on it with my nailed running boot? Don't you remember the thrills when they found it, and how Norman, who had just been on the verge of apostasy, believed in him for fully another two years?"

But Mabel's cheeks were far too puffed and swollen for her to be able to reply. She was inflating a football she had discovered cast aside in the toy cupboard.

"Look," she said at last, as she triumphantly tied the string, "I've polished it with the tan boot polish till it looks like new, and I got the grocer's boy to mend the leak in the bladder the other day when he was mending his bicycle tyre in our yard. It will delight Freddie. Certainly he asked for a drum and a kite, but he will like this much better, I know."

"But isn't that the ball Norman swopped a school-fellow his microscope for?"

"Yes, yes, I know it is. But when it wouldn't keep up, he gave up using it, and it has been tossing about the house, no use to anyone since. It's as good now as one of Harden's guinea balls."

Stephen looked sceptical. "Have you kicked it for an afternoon yet?" he asked.

"You do throw cold water, Steve," said Mabel. "Freddie is only nine—it isn't as if he were as old as Norman or Ted. And think what it saves!"

But even when the football was tied up in tissue paper, with a holly spray in its string, she was far from being ready for bed. She had to give the finishing touches to a transformation scene in which a large, war-worn, moth-eaten Teddy-bear was converted, by the aid of a grey flannel skin, a stuffed trunk, boot-button eyes, and a red flannel tongue, into a most convincing elephant. She had to finish gluing trees to the really skilful farmyard that she had herself constructed, and to people it with the more domesticated of the animals from an old Noah's Ark. She had to glue in a pair of doll's eyes, reproaching Steve, as she did so, that he did not offer to melt lead, as he might have done, and apply it, so that the eyes might shut and open as they had done in the beginning. She had to—— ⁠But he finally dragged her to bed, weary, but so extremely satisfied with her reconstructive and economic labours that he had not the courage to cavil at her.

It was perfectly true that she had filled all those stockings at a remarkably small outlay; it was perfectly true that economy, with so large a family, was still a necessity for them, though not so insistent as in the days of the fifteen-shilling train. Yet some way, as he fell asleep, the remembrance of his tobacco-less month ten years ago gave him a subtle sense of pleasure.

They were polite children and warm-hearted children. They kissed their father and mother at five a.m. most affectionately, and thanked them for the gifts. Even Little John, with so many older brothers and sisters, had long shed any belief in Santa Claus, and would have openly mocked at a sooty footprint on the hearth.

Mabel fell asleep again, overwearied by her nocturnal labours, but serenely self-satisfied. Stephen stayed awake; he was full of compunction that he had allowed Mabel to overrule him in his natural inclination to be reckless at this season. But it was not too late. He would go and shower a handful or two of shillings on them, and bid them get what they wanted themselves; not, perhaps, the ideal method, but at least an eminently satisfactory one.

He crept out of bed; he went towards the children's quarters; he stood in a doorway so hidden by the mosquito nets of one of the beds that he was entirely unseen, and the lively conversation in the room suffered no check.

"Hand over that spotted cow this minute, you little beggar! I wouldn't lose it for anything."

"'Tisn't your cow, I tell you. Your old cow had red spots and screen legs."

"You little ass, think I wouldn't know my spotted cow anywhere. Look at that broken horn and the back leg bent. I did it with taking it to school in my pencil-box. As if I wouldn't know her, just because she's been fixed up with a dab of new paint!"

"Well, make Norm stop punching Freddie to get his football back. It ought to be my football. Norm said I could have it when he thought it was rotten."

But Norman had sturdily taken over his revived exchange. "Hanged if I know how they did it," he said. "I spent a week on it myself. It really feels A1 again. But there's no knowing yet, of course."

At the washstand Ted was anxiously scrubbing at the aluminium paint on the train's wheels with his toothbrush dipped in turpentine to make sure it was removable.

"Don't blub, Fowl," he said to Little John. "I'm going to give you my sailing boat to make up. But I couldn't give you this. I've had it since I was a nipper. Yes, thank goodness, I'll be able to get this footling stuff off and the enamel. Now, see here, Fowl. I'll lend you this for a week, as it's Christmas time, and they might feel hurt, but you're going to lose it in the garden after that, d'ye hear?"

Yes, Little John heard, and with commendable stocism. The arrangement appealed to him as perfectly just—he was being surprisingly well trained in justice by his elder brothers. There was an entire week before him to play with it, and, when he gave it up, the old blue yacht would be his own. It was Ted's own train. Ted had lifted him up when he had whooping cough, and let him look at it on top of the clothes cupboard.

Besides, his fine feelings were disturbed on Ettie's account. Ettie was holding the blind doll in her arms and looking perfectly distracted because it was no longer blind. Little John had long shared Ettie's tenderness for this afflicted member of the family, this pathetic little Helen Keller of the dolls. He himself used to help to see to it that the best place at the window, the best seat on the see-saw, the best bit of chocolate, fell to the blind doll. And now she was no longer sweetly blind! She stared out at the world with a pair of hard, glassy eyes.

He turned from this curiously uncomfortable state of things to another problem that was gnawing at him. He had his new elephant under one arm, and was enormously pleased with it, but when the desire came to let it rub noses with his dear Teddy-bear, nowhere could he find his faithful friend. He went pattering barefoot about all the rooms, hunting under beds and sofas, and there was no sign of the beloved beast.

Suddenly Ettie came upon him, his lower lip sucked in as when very bitter tears were near. Swept by sympathy, she could no longer repress the secret her quick eyes had instantly discovered.

"I know where Teddy is," she whispered.

The little boy's breast heaved disbelievingly.

"Look," whispered Ettie, "under the eflelunt's trunk. Can't you see the bit of brown fur showing? Shall I get the shissors?"

Of course she should get the "shissors." In two minutes off came the grey skin, the stuffed trunk, the boot-button eyes, and Teddy was himself again.

In his passion of gratitude, Little John did exactly and precisely the right thing at the right moment. He put out his own brown little forefinger, poked firmly twice at the blue, meaningless glass eyes, and in a moment Ettie was rocking tenderly and joyously to her breast again the blind doll.