"I'll tell you what to do with them, Luclarion," said Hazel briskly.
"Teach them to play."
"Music! Pianners!" exclaimed Luclarion, dismayed.
"No. Games. Teach them to have good times. That was the first thing
ever we learnt, wasn't it, Dine? And we never could have got along
without it."
"It takes _you_!" said Luclarion, looking at Hazel with delighted
admiration.
"Does it? Well I don't know but it does. May I go, mother?
Luclarion, haven't you got a great big empty room up at the top of
the house?"
Luclarion had.
"That's just what it's for, then. Couldn't Mr. Gallilee put up a
swing? And a 'flying circle' in the middle? You see they can't go
out on the roofs; so they must have something else that will seem
kind of flighty. And _I'll_ tell you how they'll learn their
letters. Sulie and I will paint 'em; great big ones, all colors; and
hang 'em up with ribbons, and every child that learns one, so as to
know it everywhere, shall take it down and carry it home. Then we
will have marbles for numbers; and they shall play addition games,
and multiplication games, and get the sums for prizes; the ones that
get to the head, you know. Why, you don't understand _objects_,
Luclarion!"
Luclarion had been telling them of the wild little folk of Neighbor
Street, and worse, of Arctic Street. She wanted to do something with
them. She had tried to get them in with gingerbread and popcorn;
they came in fast enough for those; but they would not stay. They
were digging in the gutters and calling names; learning the foul
language of the places into which they were born; chasing and hiding
in alley-ways; filching, if they could, from shops; going off
begging with lies on their lips. It was terrible to see the springs
from which the life of the city depths was fed.
"If you could stop it _there_!" Luclarion said, and said with
reason.
"Will you let me go?" asked Hazel of her mother, in good earnest.
"'Twon't hurt her," put in Luclarion. "Nothing's catching that you
haven't got the seeds of in your own constitution. And so the
catching will be the other way."
The seeds of good,--to catch good; that was what Luclarion Grapp
believed in, in those dirty little souls,--no, those clean little
_souls_, overlaid with all outward mire and filth of body, clothing,
speech, and atmosphere, for a mile about; through which they could
no more grope and penetrate, to reach their own that was hidden from
them in the clearer life beyond, than we can grope and reach to
other stars.
"I will get Desire," quoth Hazel, inspired as she always was, both
ways.
Running in at the house in Greenley Street the next Thursday, she
ran against Uncle Titus coming out.
"What now?" he demanded.
"Desire," said Hazel. "I've come for her. We're wanted at
Luclarion's. We've got work to do."
"Humph! Work? What kind?"
"Play," said Hazel, laughing. She delighted to bother and mystify
Uncle Titus, and imagined that she did.
"I thought so. Tea parties?"
"Something like," said Hazel. "There are children down there that
don't know how to grow up. They haven't any comfortable sort of
fashion of growing up. Somebody has got to teach them. They don't
know how to play 'Grand Mufti,' and they never heard of 'King George
and his troops.' Luclarion tried to make them sit still and learn
letters; but of course they wouldn't a minute longer than the
gingerbread lasted, and they are eating her out of house and home.
It will take young folks, and week-days, you see; so Desire and I
are going." And Hazel ran up the great, flat-stepped staircase.
"Lives that have no business to be," said Uncle Titus to himself,
going down the brick walk. "The Lord has His own ways of bringing
lives together. And His own business gets worked out among them,
beyond their guessing. When a man grows old, he can stand still now
and then, and see a little."
It was a short cross street that Luclarion lived in, between two
great thoroughfares crowded with life and business, bustle,
drudgery, idleness, and vice. You will not find the name I give
it,--although you may find one that will remind you of it,--in any
directory or on any city map. But you can find the places without
the names; and if you go down there with the like errands in your
heart, you will find the work, as she found it, to do.
She heard the noise of street brawls at night, voices of men and
women quarreling in alley-ways, and up in wretched garrets; flinging
up at each other, in horrible words, all the evil they knew of in
each other's lives,--"away back," Luclarion said, "to when they were
little children."
"And what is it," she would say to Mrs. Ripwinkley telling her
about it, "that _flings_ it up, and can call it a shame, after all
the shames of years and years? Except just _that_ that the little
children _were_, underneath, when the Lord let them--He knows
why--be born so? I tell you, ma'am, it's a mystery; and the nigher
you come to it, the more it is; it's a piece of hell and a piece of
heaven; it's the wrastle of the angel and the dragon; and it's going
on at one end, while they're building up their palaces and living
soft and sweet and clean at the other, with everything hushed up
that can't at least _seem_ right and nice and proper. I know there's
good folks there, in the palaces; _beautiful_ folks; there, and all
the way down between; with God's love in them, and His hate, that is
holy, against sin; and His pity, that is _prayers_ in them, for all
people and places that are dark; but if they would _come down_
there, and take hold! I think it's them that would, that might have
part in the first resurrection, and live and reign the thousand
years."
Luclarion never counted herself among them,--those who were to have
thrones and judgments; she forgot, even, that she had gone down and
taken hold; her words came burning-true, out of her soul; and in the
heat of truth they were eloquent.
But I meant to tell you of her living.
In the daytime it was quiet; the gross evils crept away and hid from
the sunshine; there was labor to take up the hours, for those who
did labor; and you might not know or guess, to go down those
avenues, that anything worse gathered there than the dust of the
world's traffic that the lumbering drays ground up continually with
their wheels, and the wind,--that came into the city from far away
country places of green sweetness, and over hills and ponds and
streams and woods,--flung into the little children's faces.
Luclarion had taken a house,--one of two, that fronted upon a
little planked court; aside, somewhat, from Neighbor Street, as that
was a slight remove from the absolute terrible contact of Arctic
Street. But it was in the heart of that miserable quarter; she could
reach out her hands and touch and gather in, if it would let her,
the wretchedness. She had chosen a place where it was possible for
her to make a nook of refuge, not for herself only, or so much, as
for those to whom she would fain be neighbor, and help to a better
living.
It had been once a dwelling of some well-to-do family of the days
gone by; of some merchant, whose ventures went out and came in at
those wharves below, whence the air swept up pure, then, with its
salt smell, into the streets. The rooms were fairly large; Luclarion
spent money out of her own little property, that had been growing by
care and saving till she could spare from it, in doing her share
toward having it all made as sweet and clean as mortar and whitewash
and new pine-boards and paint and paper could make it. All that was
left of the old, they scoured with carbolic soap; and she had the
windows opened, and in the chimneys that had been swept of their
soot she had clear fires made and kept burning for days.
Then she put her new, plain furnishings into her own two down-stairs
rooms; and the Gallilees brought in theirs above; and beside them,
she found two decent families,--a German paper-hanger's, and that of
a carpenter at one of the theatres, whose wife worked at
dressmaking,--to take the rest. Away up, at the very top, she had
the wide, large room that Hazel spoke of, and a smaller one to which
she climbed to sleep, for the sake of air as near heaven as it could
be got.
One of her lower-rooms was her living and housekeeping room; the
other she turned into a little shop, in which she sold tapes and
needles and cheap calicoes and a few ribbons; and kept a counter on
the opposite side for bread and yeast, gingerbread, candy, and the
like. She did this partly because she must do something to help out
the money for her living and her plans, and partly to draw the women
and children in. How else could she establish any relations between
herself and them, or get any permanent hold or access? She had
"turned it all over in her mind," she said; "and a tidy little shop
with fair, easy prices, was the very thing, and a part of just what
she came down there to do."
She made real, honest, hop-raised bread, of sweet flour that she
gave ten dollars a barrel for; it took a little more than a pint,
perhaps, to make a tea loaf; that cost her three cents; she sold her
loaf for four, and it was better than they could get anywhere else
for five. Then, three evenings in a week, she had hot muffins, or
crumpets, home-made; (it was the subtle home touch and flavor that
she counted on, to carry more than a good taste into their mouths,
even a dim notion of home sweetness and comfort into their hearts;)
these first,--a quart of flour at five cents, two eggs at a cent
apiece, and a bit of butter, say three cents more, with three cents
worth of milk, made an outlay of fifteen cents for a dozen and a
half; so she sold them for ten cents a dozen, and the like had never
been tasted or dreamed of in all that region round about; no, nor I
dare almost to say, in half the region round about Republic Avenue
either, where they cannot get Luclarion Grapps to cook.
The crumpets were cheaper; they were only bread-sponge, baked on a
griddle; they were large, and light and tender; a quart of flour
would make ten; she gave the ten for seven cents.
And do you see, putting two cents on every quart of her flour, for
her labor, she _earned_, not _made_,--that word is for speculators
and brokers,--with a barrel of one hundred and ninety six pounds or
quarts, three dollars and ninety-two cents? The beauty of it was,
you perceive, that she did a small business; there was an eager
market for all she could produce, and there was no waste to allow a
margin for.
I am not a bit of a political economist myself; but I have a shrewd
suspicion that Luclarion Grapp was, besides having hit upon the
initial, individual idea of a capital social and philanthropic
enterprise.
This was all she tried to do at first; she began with bread; the
Lord from heaven began with that; she fed as much of the multitude
as she could reach; they gathered about her for the loaves; and they
got, consciously or unconsciously, more than they came or asked for.
They saw her clean-swept floor; her netted windows that kept the
flies out, the clean, coarse white cotton shades,--tacked up, and
rolled and tied with cord, country-fashion, for Luclarion would not
set any fashions that her poor neighbors might not follow if they
would;--and her shelves kept always dusted down; they could see her
way of doing that, as they happened in at different times, when she
whisked about, lightly and nicely, behind and between her jars and
boxes and parcels with the little feather duster that she kept
hanging over her table where she made her change and sat at her
sewing.
They grew ashamed by degrees,--those coarse women,--to come in in
their frowsy rags, to buy her delicate muffins or her white loaves;
they would fling on the cleanest shawl they had or could borrow, to
"cut round to Old Maid Grapp's," after a cent's worth of yeast,--for
her yeast, also, was like none other that could be got, and would
_almost_ make her own beautiful bread of itself.
Back of the shop was her house-room; the cheapest and cleanest of
carpet,--a square, bound round with bright-striped carpet-binding,--laid
in the middle of a clean dark yellow floor; a plain pine table, scoured
white, standing in the middle of that; on it, at tea-time, common blue
and white crockery cups and plates, and a little black teapot; a napkin,
coarse, but fresh from the fold, laid down to save, and at the same
time to set off, with a touch of delicate neatness, the white table;
a wooden settee, with a home-made calico-covered cushion and pillows,
set at right angles with the large, black, speckless stove; a wooden
rocking-chair, made comfortable in like manner, on the other side; the
sink in the corner, clean, freshly rinsed, with the bright tin basin
hung above it on a nail.
There was nothing in the whole place that must not be, in some
shape, in almost the poorest; but all so beautifully ordered, so
stainlessly kept. Through that open door, those women read a daily
sermon.
And Luclarion herself,--in a dark cotton print gown, a plain strip
of white about the throat,--even that was cotton, not linen, and two
of them could be run together in ten minutes for a cent,--and a
black alpacca apron, never soiled or crumpled, but washed and ironed
when it needed, like anything else,--her hair smoothly gathered back
under a small white half-handkerchief cap, plain-hemmed,--was the
sermon alive; with the soul of it, the inner sweetness and purity,
looking out at them from clear pleasant eyes, and lips cheery with a
smile that lay behind them.
She had come down there just to do as God told her to be a neighbor,
and to let her light shine. He would see about the glorifying.
She did not try to make money out of her candy, or her ginger-nuts;
she kept those to entice the little children in; to tempt them to
come again when they had once done an errand, shyly, or saucily, or
hang-doggedly,--it made little difference which to her,--in her
shop.
"I'll tell you what it's like," Hazel said, when she came in and
up-stairs the first Saturday afternoon with Desire, and showed and
explained to her proudly all Luclarion's ways and blessed
inventions. "It's like your mother and mine throwing crumbs to make
the pigeons come, when they were little girls, and lived in
Boston,--I mean _here_!"
Hazel waked up at the end of her sentence, suddenly, as we all do
sometimes, out of talking or thinking, to the consciousness that it
was _here_ that she had mentally got round to.
Desire had never heard of the crumbs or the pigeons. Mrs. Ledwith
had always been in such a hurry, living on, that she never stopped
to tell her children the sweet old tales of how she _had_ lived. Her
child-life had not ripened in her as it had done in Frank.
Desire and Hazel went up-stairs and looked at the empty room. It was
light and pleasant; dormer windows opened out on a great area of
roofs, above which was blue sky; upon which, poor clothes fluttered
in the wind, or cats walked and stretched themselves safely and
lazily in the sun.
"I always _do_ like roofs!" said Hazel. "The nicest thing in 'Mutual
Friend' is Jenny Wren up on the Jew's roof, being dead. It seems
like getting up over the world, and leaving it all covered up and
put away."
"Except the old clothes," said Desire.
"They're _washed_" answered Hazel, promptly; and never stopped to
think of the meaning.
Then she jumped down from the window, along under which a great
beam made a bench to stand on, and looked about the chamber.
"A swing to begin with," she said. "Why what is that? Luclarion's
got one!"
Knotted up under two great staples that held it, was the long loop
of clean new rope; the notched board rested against the chimney
below.
"It's all ready! Let's go down and catch one! Luclarion, we've come
to tea," she announced, as they reached the sitting-room. "There's
the shop bell!"
In the shop was a woman with touzled hair and a gown with placket
split from gathers to hem, showing the ribs of a dirty skeleton
skirt. A child with one garment on,--some sort of woolen thing that
had never been a clean color, and was all gutter-color now,--the
woman holding the child by the hand here, in a safe place, in a way
these mothers have who turn their children out in the street dirt
and scramble without any hand to hold. No wonder, though, perhaps;
in the strangeness and unfitness of the safe, pure place, doubtless
they feel an uneasy instinct that the poor little vagabonds have got
astray, and need some holding.
"Give us a four-cent loaf!" said the woman, roughly, her eyes
lowering under crossly furrowed brows, as she flung two coins upon
the little counter.
Luclarion took down one, looked at it, saw that it had a pale side,
and exchanged it for another.
"Here is a nice crusty one," she said pleasantly, turning to wrap it
in a sheet of paper.
"None o' yer gammon! Give it here; there's your money; come along,
Crazybug!" And she grabbed the loaf without a wrapper, and twitched
the child.
Hazel sat still. She knew there was no use. But Desire with her
point-black determination, went right at the boy, took hold of his
hand, dirt and all; it was disagreeable, therefore she thought she
must do it.
"Don't you want to come and swing?" she said.
"---- yer swing! and yer imperdence! Clear out! He's got swings
enough to home! Go to ----, and be ----, you ---- ---- ----!"
Out of the mother's mouth poured a volley of horrible words, like a
hailstorm of hell.
Desire fell back, as from a blinding shock of she knew not what.
Luclarion came round the counter, quite calmly.
"Ma'am," she said, "those words won't hurt _her_. She don't know the
language. But you've got God's daily bread in your hand; how can you
talk devil's Dutch over it?"
The woman glared at her. But she saw nothing but strong, calm,
earnest asking in the face; the asking of God's own pity.
She rebelled against that, sullenly; but she spoke no more foul
words. I think she could as soon have spoken them in the face of
Christ; for it was the Christ in Luclarion Grapp that looked out at
her.
"You needn't preach. You can order me out of your shop, if you like.
I don't care."
"I don't order you out. I'd rather you would come again. I don't
think you will bring that street-muck with you, though."
There was both confidence and command in the word like the "Neither
do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." It detached the street-muck
from the woman. It was not _she_; it was defilement she had picked
up, when perhaps she could not help it. She could scrape her shoes
at the door, and come in clean.
"You know a darned lot about it, I suppose!" were the last words of
defiance; softened down, however, you perceive, to that which can be
printed.
Desire was pale, with a dry sob in her throat, when the woman had
gone and Luclarion turned round.
"The angels in heaven know; why shouldn't you?" said Luclarion.
"That's what we've got to help."
A child came in afterwards, alone; with an actual clean spot in the
middle of her face, where a ginger-nut or an acid drop might go in.
This was a regular customer of a week past. The week had made that
clean spot; with a few pleasant and encouraging hints from
Luclarion, administered along with the gingerbread.
Now it was Hazel's turn.
The round mouth and eyes, with expectation in them, were like a spot
of green to Hazel, feeling with her witch-wand for a human spring.
But she spoke to Desire, looking cunningly at the child.
"Let us go back and swing," she said.
The girl's head pricked itself up quickly.
"We've got a swing up-stairs," said Hazel, passing close by, and
just pausing. "A new one. I guess it goes pretty high; and it looks
out of top windows. Wouldn't you like to come and see?"
The child lived down in a cellar.
"Take up some ginger-nuts, and eat them there," said Luclarion to
Hazel.
If it had not been for that, the girl would have hung back, afraid
of losing her shop treat.
Hazel knew better than to hold out her hand, at this first essay;
she would do that fast enough when the time came. She only walked
on, through the sitting-room, to the stairs.
The girl peeped, and followed.
Clean stairs. She had never trodden such before. Everything was
strange and clean here, as she had never seen anything before in all
her life, except the sky and the white clouds overhead. Heaven be
thanked that they are held over us, spotless, always!
Hazel heard the little feet, shuffling, in horrible, distorted
shoes, after her, over the steps; pausing, coming slowly but still
starting again, and coming on.
Up on the high landing, under the skylight, she opened the door wide
into the dormer-windowed room, and went in; she and Desire, neither
of them looking round.
Hazel got into the swing. Desire pushed; after three vibrations they
saw the ragged figure standing in the doorway, watching, turning its
head from side to side as the swing passed.
"Almost!" cried Hazel, with her feet up at the window. "There!" She
thrust them out at that next swing; they looked as if they touched
the blue.
"I can see over all the chimneys, and away off, down the water! Now
let the old cat die."
Out again, with a spring, as the swinging slackened, she still took
no notice of the child, who would have run, like a wild kitten, if
she had gone after her. She called Desire, and plunged into a closet
under the eaves.
"I wonder what's here!" she exclaimed.
"Rats!"
The girl in the doorway saw the dark, into which the low door
opened; she was used to rats in the dark.
"I don't believe it," says Hazel; "Luclarion has a cut, a great big
buff one with green eyes. She came in over the roofs, and she runs
up here nights. I shouldn't wonder if there might be kittens,
though,--one of these days, at any rate. Why! what a place to play
'Dare' in! It goes way round, I don't know where! Look here,
Desire!"
She sat on the threshold, that went up a step, over the beam, and so
leaned in. She had one eye toward the girl all the time, out of the
shadow. She beckoned and nodded, and Desire came.
At the same moment, the coast being clear, the girl gave a sudden
scud across, and into the swing. She began to scuff with her
slipshod, twisted shoes, pushing herself.
Hazel gave another nod behind her to Desire. Desire stood up, and as
the swing came back, pushed gently, touching the board only.
The girl laughed out with the sudden thrill of the motion. Desire
pushed again.
Higher and higher, till the feet reached up to the window.
"There!" she cried; and kicked an old shoe off, out over the roof.
"I've lost my shoe!"
"Never mind; it'll be down in the yard," said Hazel.
Thereupon the child, at the height of her sweep again, kicked out
the other one.
Desire and Hazel, together, pushed her for a quarter of an hour.
"Now let's have ginger-cakes," said Hazel, taking them out of her
pocket, and leaving the "cat" to die.
Little Barefoot came down at that, with a run; hanging to the rope
at one side, and dragging, till she tumbled in a sprawl upon the
floor.
"You ought to have waited," said Desire.
"Poh! I don't never wait!" cried the ragamuffin rubbing her elbows.
"I don't care."
"But it isn't nice to tumble round," suggested Hazel.
"I _ain't_ nice," answered the child, and settled the subject.
"Well, these ginger-nuts are," said Hazel. "Here!"
"Have you had a good time?" she asked when the last one was eaten,
and she led the way to go down-stairs.
"Good time! That ain't nothin'! I've had a reg'lar bust! I'm comin'
agin'; it's bully. Now I must get my loaf and my shoes, and go along
back and take a lickin'."
That was the way Hazel caught her first child.
She made her tell her name,--Ann Fazackerley,--and promise to come
on Saturday afternoon, and bring two more girls with her.
"We'll have a party," said Hazel, "and play Puss in the Corner. But
you must get leave," she added. "Ask your mother. I don't want you
to be punished when you go home."
"Lor! you're green! I ain't got no mother. An' I always hooks jack.
I'm licked reg'lar when I gets back, anyway. There's half a dozen of
'em. When 'tain't one, it's another. That's Jane Goffey's bread;
she's been a swearin' after it this hour, you bet. But I'll
come,--see if I don't!"
Hazel drew a hard breath as she let the girl go. Back to her crowded
cellar, her Jane Goffeys, the swearings, and the lickings. What was
one hour at a time, once or twice a week, to do against all this?
But she remembered the clean little round in her face, out of which
eyes and mouth looked merrily, while she talked rough slang; the
same fun and daring,--nothing worse,--were in this child's face,
that might be in another's saying prettier words. How could she help
her words, hearing nothing but devil's Dutch around her all the
time? Children do not make the language they are born into. And the
face that could be simply merry, telling such a tale as that,--what
sort of bright little immortality must it be the outlook of?
Hazel meant to try her hour.
* * * * *
This is one of my last chapters. I can only tell you now they
began,--these real folks,--the work their real living led them up
to. Perhaps some other time we may follow it on. If I were to tell
you now a finished story of it, I should tell a story ahead of the
world.
I can show you what six weeks brought it to. I can show you them
fairly launched in what may grow to a beautiful private charity,--an
"Insecution,"--a broad social scheme,--a millennium; at any rate, a
life work, change and branch as it may, for these girls who have
found out, in their girlhood, that there is genuine living, not mere
"playing pretend," to be done in the world. But you cannot, in
little books of three hundred pages, see things through. I never
expected or promised to do that. The threescore years and ten
themselves, do not do it.
It turned into regular Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Three
girls at first, then six, then less again,--sometimes only one or
two; until they gradually came up to and settled at, an average of
nine or ten.
The first Saturday they took them as they were. The next time they
gave them a stick of candy each, the first thing, then Hazel's
fingers were sticky, and she proposed the wash-basin all round,
before they went up-stairs. The bright tin bowl was ready in the
sink, and a clean round towel hung beside; and with some red and
white soap-balls, they managed to fascinate their dirty little
visitors into three clean pairs of hands, and three clean faces as
well.
The candy and the washing grew to be a custom; and in three weeks'
time, watching for a hot day and having it luckily on a Saturday,
they ventured upon instituting a whole bath, in big round tubs, in
the back shed-room, where a faucet came in over a wash bench, and a
great boiler was set close by.
They began with a foot-paddle, playing pond, and sailing chips at
the same time; then Luclarion told them they might have tubs full,
and get in all over and duck, if they liked; and children who may
hate to be washed, nevertheless are always ready for a duck and a
paddle. So Luclarion superintended the bath-room; Diana helped her;
and Desire and Hazel tended the shop. Luclarion invented a
shower-bath with a dipper and a colander; then the wet, tangled hair
had to be combed,--a climax which she had secretly aimed at with a
great longing, from the beginning; and doing this, she contrived
with carbolic soap and a separate suds, and a bit of sponge, to give
the neglected little heads a most salutary dressing.
Saturday grew into bath-day; soap-suds suggested bubbles; and the
ducking and the bubbling were a frolic altogether.
Then Hazel wished they could be put into clean clothes each time;
wouldn't it do, somehow?
But that would cost. Luclarion had come to the limit of her purse;
Hazel had no purse, and Desire's was small.
"But you see they've _got_ to have it," said Hazel; and so she went
to her mother, and from her straight to Uncle Oldways.
They counted up,--she and Desire, and Diana; two little common
suits, of stockings, underclothes, and calico gowns, apiece;
somebody to do a washing once a week, ready for the change; and
then--"those horrid shoes!"
"I don't see how you can do it," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "The things
will be taken away from them, and sold. You would have to keep
doing, over and over, to no purpose, I am afraid."
"I'll see to that," said Luclarion, facing her "stump." "We'll do
for them we can do for; if it ain't ones, it will be tothers. Those
that don't keep their things, can't have 'em; and if they're taken
away, I won't sell bread to the women they belong to, till they're
brought back. Besides, the _washing_ kind of sorts 'em out,
beforehand. 'Taint the worst ones that are willing to come, or to
send, for that. You always have to work in at an edge, in anything,
and make your way as you go along. It'll regulate. I'm _living_
there right amongst 'em; I've got a clew, and a hold; I can follow
things up; I shall have a 'circle;' there's circles everywhere. And
in all the wheels there's a moving _spirit_; you ain't got to depend
just on yourself. Things work; the Lord sees to it; it's _His_
business as much as yours."
Hazel told Uncle Titus that there were shoes and stockings and gowns
wanted down in Neighbor Street; things for ten children; they must
have subscriptions. And so she had come to him.
The Ripwinkleys had never given Uncle Titus a Christmas or a
birthday present, for fear they should seem to establish a mutual
precedent. They had never talked of their plans which involved
calculation, before him; they were terribly afraid of just one thing
with him, and only that one,--of anything most distantly like what
Desire Ledwith called "a Megilp bespeak." But now Hazel went up to
him as bold as a lion. She took it for granted he was like other
people,--"real folks;" that he would do--what must be done.
"How much will it cost?"
"For clothes and shoes for each child, about eight dollars for three
months, we guess," said Hazel. "Mother's going to pay for the
washing!"
"_Guess_? Haven't you calculated?"
"Yes, sir. 'Guess' and 'calculate' mean the same thing in Yankee,"
said Hazel, laughing.
Uncle Titus laughed in and out, in his queer way, with his shoulders
going up and down.
Then he turned round, on his swivel chair, to his desk, and wrote a
check for one hundred dollars.
"There. See how far you can make that go."
"That's good," said Hazel, heartily, looking at it; "that's
splendid!" and never gave him a word of personal thanks. It was a
thing for mutual congratulations, rather, it would seem; the "good"
was just what they all wanted, and there it was. Why should anybody
in particular be thanked, as if anybody in particular had asked for
anything? She did not say this, or think it; she simply did not
think about it at all.
And Uncle Oldways--again--liked it.
There! I shall not try, now, to tell you any more; their
experiences, their difficulties, their encouragements, would make
large material for a much larger book. I want you to know of the
idea, and the attempt. If they fail, partly,--if drunken fathers
steal the shoes, and the innocent have to forfeit for the
guilty,--if the bad words still come to the lips often, though Hazel
tells them they are not "nice,"--and beginning at the outside, they
are in a fair way of learning the niceness of being nice,--if some
children come once or twice, and get dressed up, and then go off
and live in the gutters again until the clothes are gone,--are these
real failures? There is a bright, pure place down there in Neighbor
Street, and twice a week some little children have there a bright,
pure time. Will this be lost in the world? In the great Ledger of
God will it always stand unbalanced on the debit side?
If you are afraid it will fail,--will be swallowed up in the great
sink of vice and misery, like a single sweet, fresh drop, sweet only
while it is falling,--go and do likewise; rain down more; make the
work larger, stronger; pour the sweetness in faster, till the wide,
grand time of full refreshing shall have come from the presence of
the Lord!
Ada Geoffrey went down and helped. Miss Craydocke is going to knit
scarlet stockings all winter for them; Mr. Geoffrey has put a
regular bath-room in for Luclarion, with half partitions, and three
separate tubs; Mrs. Geoffrey has furnished a dormitory, where little
homeless ones can be kept to sleep. Luclarion has her hands full,
and has taken in a girl to help her, whose board and wages Rachel
Froke and Asenath Scherman pay. A thing like that spreads every way;
you have only to be among, and one of--Real Folks.
* * * * *
Desire, besides her work in Neighbor Street, has gone into the
Normal School. She wants to make herself fit for any teaching; she
wants also to know and to become a companion of earnest, working
girls.
She told Uncle Titus this, after she had been with him a month, and
had thought it over; and Uncle Titus agreed, quite as if it were no
real concern of his, but a very proper and unobjectionable plan for
her, if she liked it.
One day, though, when Marmaduke Wharne--who had come this fall again
to stay his three days, and talk over their business,--sat with him
in his study, just where they had sat two years and a little more
ago, and Hazel and Desire ran up and down stairs together, in and
out upon their busy Wednesday errands,--Marmaduke said to Titus,--
"Afterwards is a long time, friend; but I mistrust you have found
the comfort, as well as the providence, of 'next of kin?'"
"Afterwards _is_ a long time," said Titus Oldways, gravely; "but the
Lord's line of succession stretches all the way through."
And that same night he had his other old friend, Miss Craydocke, in;
and he brought two papers that he had ready, quietly out to be
signed, each with four names: "Titus Oldways," by itself, on the one
side; on the other,--
"RACHEL FROKE,
MARMADUKE WHARNE,
KEREN-HAPPUCH CRAYDOCKE."
And one of those two papers--which are no further part of the
present story, seeing that good old Uncle Titus is at this moment
alive and well, as he has a perfect right, and is heartily welcome
to be, whether the story ever comes to a regular winding up or
not--was laid safely away in a japanned box in a deep drawer of his
study table; and Marmaduke Wharne put the other in his pocket.
He and Titus knew. I myself guess, and perhaps you do; but neither
you nor I, nor Rachel, nor Keren-happuch, know for certain; and it
is no sort of matter whether we do or not.
The "next of kin" is a better and a deeper thing than any claim of
law or register of bequest can show. Titus Oldways had found that
out; and he had settled in his mind, to his restful and satisfied
belief, that God, to the last moment of His time, and the last
particle of His created substance, can surely care for and order and
direct His own.
Is that end and moral enough for a two years' watchful trial and a
two years' simple tale?