"SESAME; AND LILIES."
"I've got a discouragement at my stomach," said Luclarion Grapp.
"What's the matter?" asked Mrs. Ripwinkley, naturally.
"Mrs. Scarup. I've been there. There ain't any bottom to it."
"Well?"
Mrs. Ripwinkley knew that Luclarion had more to say, and that she
waited for this monosyllable.
"She's sick again. And Scarup, he's gone out West, spending a
hundred dollars to see whether or no there's a chance anywhere for a
_smart_ man,--and that ain't he, so it's a double waste,--to make
fifty. No girl; and the children all under foot, and Pinkie looking
miserable over the dishes."
"Pinkie isn't strong."
"No. She's powerful weak. I just wish you'd seen that dirty
settin'-room fire-place; looks as if it hadn't been touched since
Scarup smoked his pipe there, the night before he went off a
wild-gandering. And clo'es to be ironed, and the girl cleared out,
because 'she'd always been used to fust-class families.' There
wasn't anything to your hand, and you couldn't tell where to begin,
unless you began with a cataplasm!"
Luclarion had heard, by chance, of a cataclysm, and that was what
she meant.
"It wants--creation, over again! Mrs. Scarup hadn't any fit
breakfast; there was burnt toast, made out of tough bread, that
she'd been trying to eat; and a cup of tea, half drunk; something
the matter with that, I presume. I'd have made her some gruel, if
there'd been a fire; and if there'd been any kindlings, I'd have
made her a fire; but there 'twas; there wasn't any bottom to it!"
"You had better make the gruel here, Luclarion."
"That's what I come back for. But--Mrs. Ripwinkley!"
"Well?"
"Don't it appear to you it's a kind of a stump? I don't want to do
it just for the satisfaction; though it _would_ be a satisfaction to
plough everything up thorough, and then rake it over smooth; what do
you think?"
"What have you thought, Luclarion? Something, of course."
"She wants a real smart girl--for two dollars a week. She can't get
her, because she ain't. And I kind of felt as though I should like
to put in. Seemed to me it was a--but there! I haven't any right to
stump _you_."
"Wouldn't it be rather an aggravation? I don't suppose you would
mean to stay altogether?"
"Not unless--but don't go putting it into my head, Mrs. Ripwinkley.
I shall feel as if I _was_. And I don't think it goes quite so far
as that, yet. We ain't never stumped to more than one thing at a
time. What she wants is to be straightened out. And when things once
looked _my_ way, she might get a girl, you see. Anyhow, 'twould
encourage Pinkie, and kind of set her going. Pinkie likes things
nice; but it's such a Hoosac tunnel to undertake, that she just lets
it all go, and gets off up-stairs, and sticks a ribbon in her hair.
That's all she _can_ do. I s'pose 'twould take a fortnight, maybe?"
"Take it, Luclarion," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, smiling. Luclarion
understood the smile.
"I s'pose you think it's as good as took. Well, perhaps it is--spoke
for. But it wasn't me, you know. Now what'll you do?"
"Go into the kitchen and make the pudding."
"But then?"
"We are not stumped for then, you know."
"There was a colored girl here yesterday, from up in Garden Street,
asking if there was any help wanted. I think she came in partially,
to look at the flowers; the 'sturtiums _are_ splendid, and I gave
her some. She was awfully dressed up,--for colors, I mean; but she
looked clean and pleasant, and spoke bright. Maybe she'd come,
temporary. She seemed taken with things. I know where to find her,
and I could go there when I got through with the gruel. Mrs. Scarup
must have that right off."
And Luclarion hurried away.
It was not the first time Mrs. Ripwinkley had lent Luclarion; but
Miss Grapp had not found a kitchen mission in Boston heretofore. It
was something new to bring the fashion of simple, prompt, neighborly
help down intact from the hills, and apply it here to the tangle of
city living, that is made up of so many separate and unrecognized
struggles.
When Hazel came home from school, she went all the way up the garden
walk, and in at the kitchen door. "That was the way she took it
all," she said; "first the flowers, and then Luclarion and what they
had for dinner, and a drink of water; and then up-stairs, to
mother."
To-day she encountered in the kitchen a curious and startling
apparition of change.
A very dusky brown maiden, with a petticoat of flashing purple, and
a jacket of crimson, and extremely puzzling hair tied up with knots
of corn color, stood in possession over the stove, tending a
fricassee, of which Hazel recognized at once the preparation and
savor as her mother's; while beside her on a cricket, munching cold
biscuit and butter with round, large bites of very white little
teeth, sat a small girl of five of the same color, gleaming and
twinkling as nothing human ever does gleam and twinkle but a little
darkie child.
"Where is Luclarion?" asked Hazel, standing still in the middle of
the floor, in her astonishment.
"I don't know. I'm Damaris, and this one's little Vash. Don't go for
callin' me Dam, now; the boys did that in my last place, an' I left,
don' yer see? I ain't goin' to be swore to, anyhow!"
And Damaris glittered at Hazel, with her shining teeth and her quick
eyes, full of fun and good humor, and enjoyed her end of the joke
extremely.
"Have you come to _stay_?" asked Hazel.
"'Course. I don' mostly come for to go."
"What does it mean, mother?" Hazel asked, hurrying up into her
mother's room.
And then Mrs. Ripwinkley explained.
"But what _is_ she? Black or white? She's got straight braids and
curls at the back of her head, like everybody's"--
"'Course," said a voice in the doorway. "An' wool on top,--place
where wool ought to grow,--same's everybody, too."
Damaris had come up, according to orders, to report a certain point
in the progress of the fricassee.
"They all pulls the wool over they eyes, now-days, an sticks the
straight on behind. Where's the difference?"
Mrs. Ripwinkley made some haste to rise and move toward the
doorway, to go down stairs, turning Damaris from her position, and
checking further remark. Diana and Hazel stayed behind, and laughed.
"What fun!" they said.
It was the beginning of a funny fortnight; but it is not the fun I
have paused to tell you of; something more came of it in the
home-life of the Ripwinkleys; that which they were "waiting to see."
Damaris wanted a place where she could take her little sister; she
was tired of leaving her "shyin' round," she said. And Vash, with
her round, fuzzy head, her bright eyes, her little flashing teeth,
and her polished mahogany skin,--darting up and down the house "on
Aarons," or for mere play,--dressed in her gay little scarlet
flannel shirt-waist, and black and orange striped petticoat,--was
like some "splendid, queer little fire-bug," Hazel said, and made a
surprise and a picture wherever she came. She was "cute," too, as
Damaris had declared beforehand; she was a little wonder at noticing
and remembering, and for all sorts of handiness that a child of five
could possibly be put to.
Hazel dressed rag babies for her, and made her a soap-box baby-house
in the corner of the kitchen, and taught her her letters; and began
to think that she should hate to have her go when Luclarion came
back.
Damaris proved clever and teachable in the kitchen; and had, above
all, the rare and admirable disposition to keep things scrupulously
as she had found them; so that Luclarion, in her afternoon trips
home, was comforted greatly to find that while she was "clearing and
ploughing" at Mrs. Scarup's, her own garden of neatness was not
being turned into a howling wilderness; and she observed, as is
often done so astutely, that "when you _do_ find a neat, capable,
colored help, it's as good help as you can have." Which you may
notice is just as true without the third adjective as with.
Luclarion herself was having a splendid time.
The first thing she did was to announce to Mrs. Scarup that she was
out of her place for two weeks, and would like to come to her at her
wages; which Mrs. Scarup received with some such awed and
unbelieving astonishment as she might have done the coming of a
legion of angels with Gabriel at their head. And when one strong,
generous human will, with powers of brain and body under it
sufficient to some good work, comes down upon it as Luclarion did
upon hers, there _is_ what Gabriel and his angels stand for, and no
less sent of God.
The second thing Luclarion did was to clean that "settin'-room
fire-place," to restore the pleasant brown color of its freestone
hearth and jambs, to polish its rusty brasses till they shone like
golden images of gods, and to lay an ornamental fire of chips and
clean little sticks across the irons. Then she took a wet broom and
swept the carpet three times, and dusted everything with a damp
duster; and then she advised Mrs. Scarup, whom the gruel had already
cheered and strengthened, to be "helped down, and sit there in the
easy-chair, for a change, and let her take her room in hand." And no
doctor ever prescribed any change with better effect. There are a
good many changes that might be made for people, without sending
them beyond their own doors. But it isn't the doctors who always
know _what_ change, or would dare to prescribe it if they did.
Mrs. Scarup was "helped down," it seemed,--really up, rather,--into
a new world. Things had begun all over again. It was worth while to
get well, and take courage. Those brasses shone in her face like
morning suns.
"Well, I do declare to Man, Miss Grapp!" she exclaimed; and breath
and expression failed together, and that was all she could say.
Up-stairs, Luclarion swept and rummaged. She found the sheet and
towel drawers, and made everything white and clean. She laid fresh
napkins over the table and bureau tops, and set the little
things--boxes, books, what not,--daintily about on them. She put a
clean spread on the bed, and gathered up things for the wash she
meant to have, with a recklessness that Mrs. Scarup herself would
never have dared to use, in view of any "help" she ever expected to
do it.
And then, with Pinkie to lend feeble assistance, Luclarion turned to
in the kitchen.
It was a "clear treat," she told Mrs. Ripwinkley afterward. "Things
had got to that state of mussiness, that you just began at one end
and worked through to the other, and every inch looked new made over
after you as you went along."
She put the children out into the yard on the planks, and gave them
tin pans and clothes-pins to keep house with, and gingerbread for
their dinner. She and Pinkie had cups of tea, and Mrs. Scarup had
her gruel, and went up to bed again; and that was another new
experience, and a third stage in her treatment and recovery.
When it came to the cellar, Luclarion got the chore-man in; and when
all was done, she looked round on the renovated home, and said
within herself, "If Scarup, now, will only break his neck, or get
something to do, and stay away with his pipes and his boots and his
contraptions!"
And Scarup did. He found a chance in some freight-house, and wrote
that he had made up his mind to stay out there all winter; and Mrs.
Scarup made little excursions about the house with her returning
strength, and every journey was a pleasure-trip, and the only misery
was that at the end of the fortnight Miss Grapp was going away, and
then she should be "all back in the swamp again."
"No, you won't," said Luclarion; "Pinkie's waked up, and she's going
to take pride, and pick up after the children. She can do that, now;
but she couldn't shoulder everything. And you'll have somebody in
the kitchen. See if you don't. I've 'most a mind to say I'll stay
till you do."
Luclarion's faith was strong; she knew, she said, that "if she was
doing at her end, Providence wasn't leaving off at his. Things would
come round."
This was how they did come round.
It only wanted a little sorting about. The pieces of the puzzle were
all there. Hazel Ripwinkley settled the first little bit in the
right place. She asked her mother one night, if she didn't think
they might begin their beehive with a fire-fly? Why couldn't they
keep little Vash?
"And then," said Diana, in her quiet way, slipping one of the big
three-cornered pieces of the puzzle in, "Damaris might go to Mrs.
Scarup for her two dollars a week. She is willing to work for that,
if she can get Vash taken. And this would be all the same, and
better."
Desire was with them when Luclarion came in, and heard it settled.
"How is it that things always fall right together for you, so? How
_came_ Damaris to come along?"
"You just take hold of something and try," said Luclarion. "You'll
find there's always a working alongside. Put up your sails, and the
wind will fill 'em."
Uncle Titus wanted to know "what sort of use a thing like that
could be in a house?"
He asked it in his very surliest fashion. If they had had any
motives of fear or favor, they would have been disconcerted, and
begun to think they had made a mistake.