VII
So now it was the new year. The almanac which Martin had given his father for Christmas had a red cover, whereas the old one had been blue. Martin also found to his surprise and disappointment that this was the only difference he could see between the new year and the old, that the days passed as they had passed before with ringing of bells and snow and a somber sky, with weariness of the old games and the old stories, and with the longing to be big. He longed for that time but feared it too. For his mother had often pointed at the ragman who had seen better days and said that if Martin wouldn’t eat his porridge or his beer-soup and otherwise be a good and obedient boy, he would come to be just such a ragman when he was big. When he heard his mother talk so, he would feel a tightening of the chest and would see himself slinking in through the gate at dusk with a pack on his back and poking in the ash barrel with a black stick, while father and mother and sister and grandmother were sitting together around the lamp as before. For it never occurred to him to think that his home could be broken up and dispersed.
Snow fell, a great deal of snow. The drifts grew, and it became sparklingly cold. Martin had to keep indoors with his alphabet book and multiplication tables, with his color-box and jumping-jacks and all splendid things—already faded—which Christmas had left behind. Among the jumping-jacks there was one called the Red Turk which he was fonder of than the others, because Uncle Abraham, who had given it to him, had said it was the jolliest jumping-jack in all the world. “You see,” he had said one evening, “in itself it is neither amusing nor remarkable that an old pasteboard man kicks about when one pulls the strings. But the Red Turk is no common pasteboard man; he can think and choose the same as we. And when you jerk the strings and he begins to prance, he says to himself: ‘I am a being with free will, I kick just as I want to and exclusively for my own entertainment. Hoho! there’s nothing so delightful as to kick.’ But when you stop jerking the string, he decides that he is tired and says to himself: ‘To the deuce with the kicking! The finest thing there is is to hang on a hook on the wall and stay entirely still.’ Yes, he is the jolliest jumping-jack in the world.”
Martin didn’t understand much of this, but he understood that the Red Turk was amusing and set greater store by him than ever.
So the days passed, and with Twelfth Night began small family parties with stripping of Christmas trees and shadow games and doll theaters and magic lanterns with colored pictures on a ghostly white sheet. On the way home the stars sparkled, and father pointed to the heaven and said, “That’s the Milky Way, and there is the Dipper.”
VIII
But one morning when Martin awoke he saw that the heavens shone with a brighter blue than they had for a long time and that there was a dripping from the eaves and the naked branches of the pear tree. And while he was sitting up in bed looking out at the shining blue, Maria came in with a branch that seemed to blossom in a hundred colors; but it was not flowers—it was tinted feathers. She flicked him with the branch and danced and sang that it was Shrove Tuesday and she had a holiday from school, hurrah! And there were to be buns with almond icing for dinner.
Then they took the feathers off the branch and dressed up in them and played Indians and white men, but they were both Indians.
But mother took the switch and set it in the window in a jug filled with water in the full sunlight. The room faced the east and this was the morning sun. And lo and behold! it wasn’t many days before brown-and-greenish buds came out here and there on the twigs, they swelled and grew larger, until one day they had broken out and changed into frail light-green leaves; the whole branch had become verdant, and it was spring.
One afternoon a beam of sunlight fell into the hall which faced the west.
“Look at the sun, children,” said mother. “That’s our first afternoon sun this year.”
The sunbeam fell on the polished glass of the candelabra, where it broke and strewed rainbow-colored patches all over the room on the furniture and wallpaper. Just then father passed through the hall and set the three-sided bits of glass in motion with a slight blow of his hand. There was a tumultuous dance of the colored patches around the walls, a dance as of fluttering butterflies. Martin and Maria began a chase after them. They ran till they were flushed and hot, striking their hands against the walls, and when they saw a patch on their hand instead of on the wall paper, they screamed with delight, “Now I’ve got it!”
But in the next second it glided away, the sunbeam paled, and the butterflies, weary of fluttering and shining, departed—Martin saw the last of them expire on his hand.
But it wasn’t spring yet after all.
The snow fell again, wet snow that melted at once and was dirty at once; again the bells rang in the black cupola, and it was Good Friday. Martin and Maria were in church, but they might not sit with their parents, for their parents sat far away
