he
heard from them no voice of sharing in the theory of peace, or even of
truce, but instead:--

"Two a yard and double width. Jewelry is in the Annex. Did you want
three pairs of each? Veils and neckwear three aisles over. Leather,
glassware, baskets, ribbons, down the store beyond the notions. Toys and
dolls are in the basement--toys and dolls are in the basement. Jewelry
is in the Annex...."

So that a great part of the town seemed some strong chorus of invocation
to new possessions.

But there were other voices. Whole areas of every town lay, perforce,
within the days of Christmas Week--it must have been so, for there is
only one calendar to embrace humanity, as there is only one way of birth
and breath and death, one source of tears, one functioning for laughter.
But to these reaches of the town the calendar was like another thing,
for though it was upon them in name, its very presence was withdrawn. In
those ill-smelling stairways and lofts there was little to divulge the
imminence of anything other than themselves. And wherever some echo of
Christmas Week had crept, the wistfulness or the lust was for possession
also; but here one could understand its insistence. So here the voices
said only, "I wish--I wish," and "I choose this--and this," at windows;
or, "If I had back my nickel...." "Don't you go expecting nothink!" And
over these went the whirr of machinery, beat of treadles, throb of
engines, or the silence of forced idleness, or of the disease of
dereliction. It was a time of many pagan observances, as when some were
decked in precious stuffs and some were thrown to lions.

To all these in the towns Christmas Week came. And of them all not many
stood silent and looked Christmas Week in the face. Yet it is a human
experience that none is meant to die without sharing. For the season is
the symbol of what happens to folk if they claim it.

Christmas is the time of withdrawal of most material life. It is the
time when nature subtracts the externals, hides from man the phenomena
of even her evident processes. Left alone, his thought turns inward and
outward--which is to say, it lays hold upon the flowing force so
slightly externalized in himself. If he finds in his own being a
thousand obstructions, a thousand persons,--dogs, sorcerers,
whoremongers,--he will try to escape from them all, back to the
externals. But if he finds there a channel which the substance of being
is using, he will be no stranger, b