EAVESDROPPING IN ASPEN STREET
Some of the old builders, not
the very old ones, for they built nothing but
rope-walks down behind the hill, but some
of those who began to go northwest from the State
House to live, made a pleasant group of streets down
there on the level stretching away to the river, and
called them by fresh, fragrant, country-suggesting
names. Names of trees and fields and gardens,
fruits and blossoms; and they built houses with gardens
around them. In between the blocks were deep,
shady places; and the smell of flowers was tossed
back and forth by summer winds between the walls.
Some nice old people stayed on there, and a few of
their descendants stay on there still, though they
are built in closely now, for the most part, and coarse,
common things have much intruded, and Summit Street
overshadows them with its palaces.
Here and there a wooden house, set
back a little, like this of the Ripwinkleys in Aspen
Street, gives you a feeling of Boston in the far back
times, as you go by; and here and there, if you could
get into the life of the neighborhood, you might perhaps
find a household keeping itself almost untouched with
change, though there has been such a rush and surge
for years up and over into the newer and prouder places.
At any rate, Titus Oldways lived here
in Greenley Street; and he owned the Aspen Street
house, and another over in Meadow Place, and another
in Field Court. He meant to stretch his control
over them as long as he could, and keep them for families;
therefore he valued them at such rates as they would
bring for dwellings; he would not sell or lease them
for any kind of “improvements;” he would
not have their little door-yards choked up, or their
larger garden spaces destroyed, while he could help
it.
Round in Orchard Street lived Miss
Craydocke. She was away again, now, staying a
little while with the Josselyns in New York. Uncle
Titus told Mrs. Ripwinkley that when Miss Craydocke
came back it would be a neighborhood, and they could
go round; now it was only back and forth between them
and him and Rachel Froke. There were other people,
too, but they would be longer finding them out.
“You’ll know Miss Craydocke as soon as
you see her; she is one of those you always seem to
have seen before.”
Now Uncle Titus would not have said
this to everybody; not even if everybody had been
his niece, and had come to live beside him.
Orchard Street is wide and sunny and
pleasant; the river air comes over it and makes it
sweet; and Miss Craydocke’s is a big, generous
house, of which she only uses a very little part herself,
because she lets the rest to nice people who want
pleasant rooms and can’t afford to pay much
rent; an old gentleman who has had a hard time in
the world, but has kept himself a gentleman through
it all, and his little cheery old lady-wife who puts
her round glasses on and stitches away at fine women’s
under-garments and flannel embroideries, to keep things
even, have the two very best rooms; and a clergyman’s
widow, who copies for lawyers, and writes little stories
for children, has another; and two orphan sisters who
keep school have another; and Miss Craydocke calls
her house the Beehive, and buzzes up and down in it,
and out and in, on little “seeing-to”
errands of care and kindness all day long, as never
any queen-bee did in any beehive before, but in a
way that makes her more truly queen than any sitting
in the middle cell of state to be fed on royal jelly.
Behind the Beehive, is a garden, as there should be;
great patches of lily-of-the valley grow there that
Miss Craydocke ties up bunches from in the spring
and gives away to little children, and carries into
all the sick rooms she knows of, and the poor places.
I always think of those lilies of the valley when I
think of Miss Craydocke. It seems somehow as if
they were blooming about her all the year through;
and so they are, perhaps, invisibly. The other
flowers come in their season; the crocuses have been
done with first of all; the gay tulips and the snowballs
have made the children glad when they stopped at the
gate and got them, going to school. Miss Craydocke
is always out in her garden at school-time. By
and by there are the tall white lilies, standing cool
and serene in the July heats; then Miss Craydocke
is away at the mountains, pressing ferns and drying
grasses for winter parlors; but there is somebody
on duty at the garden dispensary always, and there
are flower-pensioners who know they may come in and
take the gracious toll.
Late in the autumn, the nasturtiums
and verbenas and marigolds are bright; and the asters
quill themselves into the biggest globes they can,
of white and purple and rose, as if it were to make
the last glory the best, and to do the very utmost
of the year. Then the chrysanthemums go into
the house and bloom there for Christmas-time.
There is nothing else like Miss Craydocke’s
house and garden, I do believe, in all the city of
the Three Hills. It is none too big for her,
left alone with it, the last of her family; the world
is none too big for her; she is glad to know it is
all there. She has a use for everything as fast
as it comes, and a work to do for everybody, as fast
as she finds them out. And everybody, almost, catches
it as she goes along, and around her there is always
springing up a busy and a spreading crystallizing
of shining and blessed elements. The world is
none too big for her, or for any such, of course,
because, it has been told why better than
I can tell it, because “ten times
one is always ten.”
It was a gray, gusty morning.
It had not set in to rain continuously; but the wind
wrung handfuls of drops suddenly from the clouds,
and flung them against the panes and into the wayfarers’
faces.
Over in the house opposite the Ripwinkley’s,
at the second story windows, sat two busy young persons.
Hazel, sitting at her window, in “mother’s
room,” where each had a corner, could see across;
and had got into the way of innocent watching.
Up in Homesworth, she had used to watch the robins
in the elm-trees; here, there was human life, in little
human nests, all about her.
“It’s the same thing,
mother,” she would say, “isn’t it,
now? Don’t you remember in that book of
the ‘New England Housekeeper,’ that you
used to have, what the woman said about the human nature
of the beans? It’s in beans, and birds,
and bird’s nests; and folks, and folks’
nests. It don’t make much difference.
It’s just snugness, and getting along.
And it’s so nice to see!”
Hazel put her elbows up on the window-sill,
and looked straight over into that opposite room,
undisguisedly.
The young man, in one window, said to his sister in the other,
at the same moment,
“Our company’s come!
There’s that bright little girl again!”
And the sister said, “Well,
it’s pretty much all the company we can take
in! She brings her own seat and her own window;
and she doesn’t interrupt. It’s just
the kind for us, Kentie!”
“She’s writing, copying
something, music, it looks like; see it
there, set up against the shutter. She always
goes out with a music roll in her hand. I wonder
whether she gives or takes?” said Diana, stopping
on her way to her own seat to look out over Hazel’s
shoulder.
“Both, I guess,” said
Mrs. Ripwinkley. “Most people do. Why
don’t you put your flowers in the window, Hazel?”
“Why, so I will!”
They were a great bunch of snowy white
and deep crimson asters, with green ivy leaves, in
a tall gray glass vase. Rachel Froke had just
brought them in from Miss Craydocke’s garden.
“They’re looking, mother!
Only I do think it’s half too bad! That
girl seems as if she would almost reach across after
them. Perhaps they came from the country, and
haven’t had any flowers.”
“Thee might take them over some,”
said Mrs. Froke, simply.
“O, I shouldn’t dare!
There are other people in the house, and I don’t
know their names, or anything. I wish I could,
though.”
“I can,” said Rachel Froke.
“Thee’ll grow tall enough to step over
pebbles one of these days. Never mind; I’ll
fetch thee more to-morrow; and thee’ll let the
vase go for a while? Likely they’ve nothing
better than a tumbler.”
Rachel Froke went down the stairs,
and out along the paved walk, into the street.
She stopped an instant on the curb-stone before she
crossed, and looked up at those second story windows.
Hazel watched her. She held up the vase slightly
with one hand, nodding her little gray bonnet kindly,
and beckoned with the other.
The young girl started from her seat.
In another minute Hazel saw them together in the doorway.
There was a blush and a smile, and
an eager brightness in the face, and a quick speaking
thanks, that one could read without hearing, from
the parted lips, on the one side, and the quiet, unflutterable
gray bonnet calmly horizontal on the other; and then
the door was shut, and Rachel Froke was crossing the
damp pavement again.
“I’m so glad Aspen Street
is narrow!” said Hazel. “I should
hate to be way off out of sight of people. What
did you say to her, Mrs. Froke?” she asked,
as the Friend reentered. Hazel could by no means
take the awful liberty of “Rachel.”
“I said the young girl, Hazel
Ripwinkley, being from the country, knew how good
flowers were to strangers in the town, and that she
thought they might be strange, and might like some.”
Hazel flushed all up. At that
same instant, a gentle nod and smile came across from
window to window, and she flushed more, till the tears
sprung with the shy, glad excitement, as she returned
it and then shrunk away.
“And she said, ‘Thank
her, with Dorris Kincaid’s love,’”
proceeded Rachel Froke.
“O, mother!” exclaimed
Hazel. “And you did it all, right off so,
Mrs. Froke. I don’t see how grown up people
dare, and know how!”
Up the stairs ran quick feet in little
clattering heeled boots. Desire Ledwith, with
a purple waterproof on, came in.
“I couldn’t stay at home
to-day,” she said, “I wanted to be where
it was all-togetherish. It never is at our house.
Now it’s set up, they don’t do anything
with it.”
“That’s because it ’looks’ so
elegant,” said Hazel, catching herself up in
dismay.
“It’s because it’s
the crust, I think,” said Desire. “Puff
paste, like an oyster patty; and they haven’t
got anything cooked yet for the middle. I wonder
when they will. I had a call yesterday, all to
myself,” she went on, with a sudden change of
tone and topic. “Agatha was hopping and
I wouldn’t tell her what I said, or how I behaved.
That new parlor girl of ours thinks we’re all
or any of us ‘Miss Ledwith,’ mamma included,
and so she let him in. He had on lavender pantaloons
and a waxed moustache.”
“The rain is just pouring down!”
said Diana, at the garden window.
“Yes; I’m caught.
That’s what I meant,” said Desire.
“You’ve got to keep me all day, now.
How will you get home, Mrs. Froke? Or won’t
you have to stay, too?”
“Thee may call me Rachel, Desire
Ledwith, if thee pleases. I like it better.
I am no mistress. And for getting home, it is
but just round the corner. But there is no need
yet. I came for an hour, to sit here with friend
Frances. And my hour is not yet up.”
“I’m glad of that, for
there is something I want you to tell me. I haven’t
quite got at it myself, yet; so as to ask, I mean.
Wait a minute!” And she put her elbows up on
her knees, and held her thumbs against her ears, and
her fingers across her forehead; sitting squarely
opposite the window to which she had drawn up her chair
beside Diane, and looking intently at the driving streams
that rushed and ran down against the glass.
“I was sitting in the bay-window
at home, when it began this morning; that made me
think. All the world dripping wet, and I just
put there dry and safe in the middle of the storm,
shut up behind those great clear panes and tight sashes.
How they did have to contrive, and work, before there
were such places made for people! What if they
had got into their first scratchy little houses, and
sat behind the logs as we do behind glass windows and
thought, as I was thinking, how nice it was just to
be covered up from the rain? Is it all finished
now? Hasn’t anybody got to contrive anything
more? And who’s going to do it and
everything. And what are we good for, just
we, to come and expect it all, modern-improved!
I don’t think much of our place among things,
do you, Mrs. Froke? There, I believe that’s
it, as near as I can!’”
“Why does thee ask me, Desire?”
“I don’t know. I
don’t know any whys or what fors. ’Behold
we know not anything,’ Tennyson and
I! But you seem so pacified I
suppose I thought you must have settled most things
in your mind.”
“Every builder every
little joiner did his piece, thought
his thought out, I think likely. There’s
no little groove or moulding or fitting or finish,
but is a bit of somebody’s living; and life
grows, going on. We’ve all got our piece
to do,” said Rachel.
“I asked Mrs. Mig,” Desire
pursued, “and she said some people’s part
was to buy and employ and encourage; and that spending
money helps all the world; and then she put another
cushion to her back, and went on tatting.”
“Perhaps it does in
spite of the world,” said Rachel Froke, quietly.
“But I guess nobody is to sit
by and only encourage; God has given out no
such portion as that, I do believe. We can encourage
each other, and every one do his own piece too.”
“I didn’t really suppose
Mrs. Mig knew,” said Desire, demurely. “She
never began at the bottom of anything. She only
finishes off. She buys pattern worsted work,
and fills it in. That’s what she’s
doing now, when she don’t tat; a great bunch
of white lilies, grounding it with olive. It’s
lovely; but I’d rather have made the lilies.
She’ll give it to mother, and then Glossy will
come and spend the winter with us. Mrs. Mig is
going to Nassau with a sick friend; she’s awfully
useful for little overseeings and general
touchings up, after all the hard part is done.
Mrs. Mig’s sick friends always have nurses and
waiting maids Mrs. F
Rachel! Do you know, I haven’t got any
piece!”
“No, I don’t know; nor
does thee either, yet,” said Rachel Froke.
“It’s all such bosh!”
said Kenneth Kincaid, flinging down a handful of papers.
“I’ve no right, I solemnly think, to help
such stuff out into the world! A man can’t
take hold anywhere, it seems, without smutting his
fingers!”
Kenneth Kincaid was correcting proof
for a publisher. What he had to work on this
morning was the first chapters of a flimsy novel.
“It isn’t even confectionery,”
said he. “It’s terra alba
and cochineal. And when it comes to the sensation,
it will be benzine for whiskey. Real things are
bad enough, for the most part, in this world; but
when it comes to sham fictions and adulterated poisons,
Dorris, I’d rather help bake bread, if it were
an honest loaf, or make strong shoes for laboring
men!”
“You don’t always get
things like that,” said Dorris. “And
you know you’re not responsible. Why will
you torment yourself so?”
“I was so determined not to
do anything but genuine work; work that the world
wanted; and to have it come down to this!”
“Only for a time, while you are waiting.”
“Yes; people must eat while
they are waiting; that’s the devil
of it! I’m not swearing, Dorris, dear;
it came truly into my head, that minute, about the
Temptation in the Wilderness.” Kenneth’s
voice was reverent, saying this; and there was an
earnest thought in his face.
“You’ll never like anything
heartily but your Sunday work.”
“That’s what keeps me
here. My week-day work might be wanted somewhere
else. And perhaps I ought to go. There’s
Sunday work everywhere.”
“If you’ve found one half,
hold on to it;” said Dorris. “The
other can’t be far off.”
“I suppose there are a score
or two of young architects in this city, waiting for
a name or a chance to make one, as I am. If it
isn’t here for all of them, somebody has got
to quit.”
“And somebody has got to hold
on,” repeated Dorris. “You are morbid,
Kent, about this ‘work of the world.’”
“It’s overdone, everywhere.
Fifth wheels trying to hitch on to every coach.
I’d rather be the one wheel of a barrow.”
“The Lord is Wheelwright, and
Builder,” said Dorris, very simply. “You
are a wheel, and He has made you; He’ll
find an axle for you and put you on; and you shall
go about his business, so that you shall wonder to
remember that you were ever leaning up against a wall.
Do you know, Kentie, life seems to me like the game
we used to play at home in the twilight. When
we shut our eyes and let each other lead us, until
we did not know where we were going, or in what place
we should come out. I should not care to walk
up a broad path with my eyes wide open, now.
I’d rather feel the leading. To-morrow
always makes a turn. It’s beautiful!
People don’t know, who never shut their
eyes!”
Kenneth had taken up a newspaper.
“The pretenses at doing!
The dodges and go-betweens that make a sham work between
every two real ones! There’s hardly a true
business carried on, and if there is, you don’t
know where or which. Look at the advertisements.
Why, they cheat with their very tops and faces!
See this man who puts in big capitals: ’Lost!
$5,000! $1,000 reward!’ and then tells you,
in small type, that five thousand dollars are lost
every year by breaking glass and china, that his cement
will mend! What business has he to cry ‘Wolf!’
to the hindrance of the next man who may have a real
wolf to catch? And what business has the printer,
whom the next man will pay to advertise his loss,
to help on a lie like this beforehand? I’m
only twenty-six years old, Dorris, and I’m getting
ashamed of the world!”
“Don’t grow hard, Kenneth.
’The Son of Man came not to condemn the world,
but to save it.’ Let’s each try to
save our little piece!”
We are listening across the street,
you see; between the windows in the rain; it is strange
what chords one catches that do not catch each other,
and were never planned to be played together, by
the players.
Kenneth Kincaid’s father Robert
had been a ship-builder. When shipping went down
in the whirlpool of 1857, Robert Kincaid’s building
had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children
little beside their education, which he thanked God
was secured, and a good repute that belonged to their
name, but was easily forgotten in the crowd of young
and forward ones, and in the strife and scramble of
a new business growth.
Between college and technical studies
Kenneth had been to the war. After that he had
a chance to make a fortune in Wall Street. His
father’s brother, James, offered to take him
in with him to buy and sell stocks and gold, to watch
the market, to touch little unseen springs, to put
the difference into his own pocket every time the
tide of value shifted, or could be made to seem to
shift. He might have been one of James R. Kincaid
and Company. He would have none of it. He
told his uncle plainly that he wanted real work; that
he had not come back from fighting to well,
there he stopped, for he could not fling the truth
in his uncle’s face; he said there were things
he meant to finish learning, and would try to do; and
if nobody wanted them of him he would learn something
else that was needed. So with what was left to
his share from his father’s little remnant of
property, he had two years at the Technological School,
and here he was in Boston waiting. You can see
what he meant by real work, and how deep his theories
and distinctions lay. You can see that it might
be a hard thing for one young man, here or there, to
take up the world on these terms now, in this year
of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-nine.
Over the way Desire Ledwith was beginning
again, after a pause in which we have made our little
chassee.
“I know a girl,” she said,
“who has got a studio. And she talks about
art, and she knows styles, and who has done what, and
she runs about to see pictures, and she copies things,
and she has little plaster legs and toes and things
hanging round everywhere. She thinks it is something
great; but it’s only Mig, after all. Everything
is. Florence Migs into music. And I won’t
Mig, if I never do anything. I’m come here
this morning to darn stockings.” And she
pulled out of her big waterproof pocket a bundle of
stockings and a great white ball of darning cotton
and a wooden egg.
“There is always one thing that
is real,” said Mrs. Ripwinkley, gently, “and
that shows the way surely to all the rest.”
“I know what you mean,”
said Desire, “of course; but they’ve mixed
that all up too, like everything else, so that you
don’t know where it is. Glossy Megilp has
a velvet prayer-book, and she blacks her eyelashes
and goes to church. We’ve all been baptized,
and we’ve learned the Lord’s Prayer, and
we’re all Christians. What is there more
about it? I wish, sometimes, they had let it all
alone. I think they vaccinated us with religion,
Aunt Frank, for fear we should take it the natural
way.”
“Thee is restless,” said
Rachel Froke, tying on her gray cloak. “And
to make us so is oftentimes the first thing the Lord
does for us. It was the first thing He did for
the world. Then He said, ’Let there be
light!’ In the meantime, thee is right; just
darn thy stockings.” And Rachel went.
They had a nice morning, after that,
“leaving frets alone,” as Diana said.
Diana Ripwinkley was happy in things just as they were.
If the sun shone, she rejoiced in the glory; if the
rain fell, it shut her in sweetly to the heart of
home, and the outside world grew fragrant for her
breathing. There was never anything in her day
that she could spare out of it, and there were no
holes in the hours either. “Whether she
was most bird or bee, it was hard to tell,” her
mother said of her; from the time she used to sweep
and dust her garret baby-house along the big beams
in the old house at Homesworth, and make little cheeses,
and set them to press in wooden pill-boxes from which
she had punched the bottoms out, till now, that she
began to take upon herself the daily freshening of
the new parlors in Aspen Street, and had long lessons
of geometry to learn, whose dry demonstrations she
set to odd little improvised recitatives of music,
and chanted over while she ran up and down putting
away clean linen for her mother, that Luclarion brought
up from the wash.
As for Hazel, she was only another
variation upon the same sweet nature. There was
more of outgo and enterprise with her. Diana made
the thing or the place pleasant that she was in or
doing. Hazel sought out new and blessed inventions.
“There was always something coming to the child
that wouldn’t ever have come to no one else,”
Luclarion said. “And besides that, she was
a real ‘Witch Hazel;’ she could tell where
the springs were, and what’s more, where they
warn’t.”
Luclarion Grapp would never have pleaded
guilty to “dropping into poetry” in any
light whatsoever; but what she meant by this was not
exactly according to the letter, as one may easily
see.