The escape of Alice: A Christmas fantasy

								

at its remarkable duplication. By five o’clock the little girl knew
just what each and every Santa Claus was going to say to her, and what
was coming next, and that one――at least――of the three remaining Santas
would want to kiss her. She had been kissed almost to death, as it was,
and that was beginning to bore her, too.
It occurred to Alice, who was a shrewd little girl and not one of your
bleating lambs, that Santa Claus, despite his profusion――or because of
it――might be something of an old fraud, after all. She was entirely
certain that not one of him resembled the jolly old saint of her mental
picture. The cottony fellow at Wanacooper’s was not a bit red and
chubby, nor very jovial either; and she hoped that the others――at the
Emporium, and the Bargain Store, and the Bon Marché――would agree more
sympathetically, as to corpulence, with the merry and very dear old
gentleman of her favorite poem.
She repeated the first lines, softly, under her breath:



    ’Twas the night before Christmas,

      And all through the house

    Not a creature was stirring,

      Not even a mouse....
Well, that was not not surprising. Obviously, all the creatures who
might otherwise have been stirring about the house on the night before
Christmas were crowding and jostling each other in department stores,
buying useless presents for people they didn’t like. Alice thought it
odd that this hadn’t occurred to her before. It made the beginning of
the poem quite clear.
The Santa Claus at the Emporium was entirely surrounded by children.
Entirely surrounded? Why not? The schoolroom definition of an island
is authority for it: “An island is a body of land entirely surrounded
by water.” Sticklers for accuracy will have it that the “entirely” is
extraneous. If, they say, if he――or it――that is, Santa Claus or the
island――is surrounded by anything (whether water or children), he――or
it――is surrounded, and that is all there is to it. Not “entirely
surrounded”; just surrounded. Happily, Alice knew nothing of this.
As for us, we are nothing if not independent, and care nothing for
grammarians――nothing at all. The Santa Claus at the Emporium was
entirely surrounded by children, just like all his duplicates, and, in
the midst of an alarming racket, was writing long lists of juvenile
wants in a big bookkeeper’s ledger. The big bookkeeper was nowhere
about, and so the old fellow went right ahead, just as if it had been
his own ledger, and filled as many columns as a child wished, in the
most amiable manner in the world. He was the nicest Santa Claus Alice
had yet seen.
He did not immediately notice Alice, who was neither larger nor smaller
than most of the other children shouting around him; but when he did
notice her he liked her right away. He liked the old-fashioned way of
her, and her last century clothes, and from the way she looked at him
he was sure that she, at least, believed in him, and wasn’t dropping