Jimsy The Christmas Kid

Excerpt

THE INVASION

His name was Jimsy and he took it for granted that you liked him. That made things difficult from the very start—that and the fact that he arrived in the village two days before Christmas strung to such a holiday pitch of expectation that, if you were a respectable, bewhiskered first citizen like Jimsy's host, you felt the cut-and-dried dignity of a season which unflinching thrift had taught you to pare of all its glittering non-essentials, threatened by his bubbling air of faith in something wonderful to happen.

He had arrived at twilight, just as the first citizen was about to read his evening paper, and he had made a great deal of noise, yelling back at old Austin White, whose sleigh had conveyed him from the station to the house, a "S'long, Uncle!" pregnant with the friendliness of a conversational ride. He had scraped away his snow-heels with a somewhat sustained noise, born perhaps of shyness, and now, as he stood in the center of the prim, old-fashioned room, a thin, eager youngster not too warmly clad for the bite of the New England wind, Abner Sawyer felt with a sense of shock that this city urchin whom Judith had promised to "Christmas," detracted, in some ridiculous manner, from the respectability of the room. He was an inharmonious note in its staid preciseness. Moreover, it was evident from the frank friendliness of his dark, gray eyes that he was perniciously of that type who frolic through a frosty, first-citizen aura of informality and give and accept friendship as a matter of course.

"What—what is your name?" asked the first citizen, peering over his spectacles. He wished that Judith's Christmas protégé was not so thin and a trifle larger.

"Jimsy," answered the boy. "An' Specks, he's me chum; he goes to Mister Middleton's, next door."

Specks and Jimsy! The first citizen helplessly cleared his throat and summoned Judith.

She came in a spotless apron no whiter than her hair. She was spare—Aunt Judith Sawyer—spare and patient as the wife of a provident man may well be who sees no need for servants, and her primness was of a gentler, vaguer sort than that of Abner Sawyer. Jimsy glanced up into her sweet, tired face and his eager eyes claimed her with a bewildering smile of welcome. Then because Jimsy's experience with clean aprons and trimly parted hair was negligible almost to the point of non-existence, it became instantly imperative that he should polish the toe of one worn shoe with the sole of the other and study the result and Aunt Judith with furtive interest.

"Judith," said the first citizen, not wholly at his ease, "Mr.—er—ah—Mr. Jimsy has arrived."

Jimsy snickered.

"Naw, naw, nix!" he said. "Jimsy's the handle. I'm a stray, I am. Hain't got no folks. Mom Dorgan says ye have to have folks to have a bunch-name. I'm the Christmas kid."

"To be sure you are," said Aunt Judith gently, "to be sure. And where are your things?"

Jimsy's thin little face reddened.

"Hain't only got one rig," he mumbled, "an' that warn't fitten to wear....