Christmas Eve

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Title: Christmas Eve
Author: Robert Browning
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6670]
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one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on January 12,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTMAS
EVE ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
CHRISTMAS EVE
ROBERT BROWNING
I
Out of the little chapel I burst
Into the fresh night-air again.
Five
minutes full, I waited first
In the doorway, to escape the rain
That
drove in gusts down the common's centre
At the edge of which the
chapel stands,
Before I plucked up heart to enter.
Heaven knows
how many sorts of hands
Reached past me, groping for the latch
Of
the inner door that hung on catch
More obstinate the more they
fumbled,
Till, giving way at last with a scold
Of the crazy hinge, in
squeezed or tumbled
One sheep more to the rest in fold,
And left
me irresolute, standing sentry
In the sheepfold's lath-and-plaster entry,

Six feet long by three feet wide,
Partitioned off from the vast
inside--
I blocked up half of it at least.
No remedy; the rain kept
driving.
They eyed me much as some wild beast,
That congregation,
still arriving,
Some of them by the main road, white
A long way
past me into the night,
Skirting the common, then diverging;
Not a
few suddenly emerging
From the common's self thro' the paling-gaps

--They house in the gravel-pits perhaps,
Where the road stops short
with its safeguard border
Of lamps, as tired of such disorder;--
But
the most turned in yet more abruptly
From a certain squalid knot of
alleys,
Where the town's bad blood once slept corruptly,
Which
now the little chapel rallies
And leads into day again,--its priestliness


Lending itself to hide their beastliness
So cleverly (thanks in part
to the mason),
And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on
Those
neophytes too much in lack of it,
That, where you cross the common

as I did,
And meet the party thus presided,
"Mount Zion" with
Love-lane at the back of it,
They front you as little disconcerted
As,
bound for the hills, her fate averted,
And her wicked people made to
mind him,
Lot might have marched with Gomorrah
behind him.
II
Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock: the
fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
Her
umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,

A wreck of whalebones; then, with snort,
Like a startled horse, at
the interloper
(Who humbly knew himself improper,
But could not
shrink up small enough)
--Round to the door, and in,--the gruff

Hinge's invariable scold
Making my very blood run cold.
Prompt in
the wake of her, up-pattered
On broken clogs, the many-tattered

Little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she
tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face,
From the cold,
on her breast, the one warm place;
She too must stop, wring the poor
ends dry
Of a draggled shawl, and add therebyHer tribute to the
door-mat, sopping Already from my own clothes' dropping,
Which
yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on:
Then, stooping down to
take off her pattens,
She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,

Planted together before her breast
And its babe, as good as a lance in
rest.
Close on her heels, the dingy satins
Of a female something,
past me flitted,
With lips as much too white, as a streak
Lay far too
red on each hollow cheek;
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied

All that was left of a woman once,
Holding at least its tongue for
the nonce.
Then a tall yellow man, like the Penitent Thief,
With his
jaw bound up in a handkerchief,
And eyelids screwed together tight,

Led himself in by some inner light.
And, except from him, from
each that entered,
I got the same interrogation--
"What, you the
alien, you have ventured
"To take with us, the elect, your station?

"A carer for none of it, a Gallio!"--
Thus, plain as print, I read the

glance
At a common prey, in each countenance
As of huntsman
giving his hounds the tallyho.
And, when the door's cry drowned their
wonder,
The draught, it always sent in shutting,
Made the flame of
the single