HAZEL’S INSPIRATION
What was the use of “looking,”
unless things were looked at? Mrs. Ledwith found
at the end of the winter that she ought to give a
party. Not a general one; Mrs. Ledwith always
said “not a general one,” as if it were
an exception, whereas she knew better than ever to
undertake a general party; her list would be too
general, and heterogeneous. It would simply be
a physical, as well as a social, impossibility.
She knew quantities of people separately and very
cordially, in her easy have-a-good-time-when-you-can
style, that she could by no means mix, or even gather
together. She picked up acquaintances on summer
journeys, she accepted civilities wherever she might
be, she asked everybody to her house who took a fancy
to her, or would admire her establishment, and if
she had had a spring cleaning or a new carpeting,
or a furbishing up in any way, the next thing was
always to light up and play it off, to try
it on to somebody. What were houses for?
And there was always somebody who ought to be paid
attention to; somebody staying with a friend, or a
couple just engaged, or if nothing else, it was her
turn to have the sewing-society; and so her rooms
got aired. Of course she had to air them now!
The drawing-room, with its apricot and coffee-brown
furnishings, was lovely in the evening, and the crimson
and garnet in the dining-room was rich and cozy, and
set off brilliantly her show of silver and cut-glass;
and then, there was the new, real, sea-green China.
So the party was had. There were
some people in town from New York; she invited them
and about a hundred more. The house lit up beautifully;
the only pity was that Mrs. Ledwith could not wear
her favorite and most becoming colors, buff and chestnut,
because she had taken that family of tints for her
furniture; but she found a lovely shade of violet
that would hold by gas-light, and she wore black Fayal
lace with it, and white roses upon her hair. Mrs.
Treweek was enchanted with the brown and apricot drawing-room,
and wondered where on earth they had got that particular
shade, for “my dear! she had ransacked Paris
for hangings in just that perfect, soft, ripe color
that she had in her mind and never could hit upon.”
Mrs. MacMichael had pushed the grapes back upon her
plate to examine the pattern of the bit of china,
and had said how lovely the coloring was, with the
purple and pale green of the fruit. And these
things, and a few more like them, were the residuum
of the whole, and Laura Ledwith was satisfied.
Afterward, “while they were
in the way of it,” Florence had a little musicale;
and the first season in Shubarton Place was over.
It turned out, however, as it did
in the old rhyme, they shod the horse,
and shod the mare, and let the little colt go bare.
Helena was disgusted because she could not have a
“German.”
“We shall have to be careful,
now that we have fairly settled down,” said
Laura to her sister; “for every bit of Grant’s
salary will have been taken up with this winter’s
expenses. But one wants to begin right, and after
that one can go on moderately. I’m good
at contriving, Frank; only give me something to contrive
with.”
“Isn’t it a responsibility,”
Frank ventured, “to think what we shall contrive
for?”
“Of course,” returned
Mrs. Ledwith, glibly. “And my first duty
is to my children. I don’t mean to encourage
them to reckless extravagance; as Mrs. Megilp says,
there’s always a limit; but it’s one’s
duty to make life beautiful, and one can’t do
too much for home. I want my children to be satisfied
with theirs, and I want to cultivate their tastes
and accustom them to society. I can’t do
everything for them; they will dress on three
hundred a year apiece, Agatha and Florence; and I
can assure you it needs management to accomplish that,
in these days!”
Mrs. Ripwinkley laughed, gently.
“It would require management
with us to get rid of that, upon ourselves.”
“O, my dear, don’t I tell
you continually, you haven’t waked up yet?
Just rub your eyes a while longer, or let
the girls do it for you, and you’ll
see! Why, I know of girls, girls whose
mothers have limited incomes, too, who
have been kept plain, actually plain, all their
school days, but who must have now six and eight hundred
a year to go into society with. And really I wouldn’t
undertake it for less, myself, if I expected to keep
up with everything. But I must treat mine all
alike, and we must be contented with what we have.
There’s Helena, now, crazy for a young party;
but I couldn’t think of it. Young parties
are ten times worse than old ones; there’s really
no end to the expense, with the German, and
everything. Helena will have to wait; and yet, of
course, if I could, it is desirable, almost necessary;
acquaintances begin in the school-room, society,
indeed; and a great deal would depend upon it.
The truth is, you’re no sooner born, now-a-days,
than you have to begin to keep up; or else you’re
dropped out.”
“O, Laura! do you remember the
dear little parties our mother used to make for us?
From four till half-past eight, with games, and tea
at six, and the fathers looking in?”
“And cockles, and mottoes, and
printed cambric dresses, and milk and water!
Where are the children, do you suppose, you dear old
Frau Van Winkle, that would come to such a party now?”
“Children must be born simple,
as they were then. There’s nothing my girls
would like better, even at their age, than to help
at just such a party. It is a dream of theirs.
Why shouldn’t somebody do it, just to show how
good it is?”
“You can lead a horse to water,
you know, Frank, but you can’t make him drink.
And the colts are forty times worse. I believe
you might get some of the mothers together for an
ancient tea-drink, just in the name of old association;
but the babies would all turn up their new-fashioned
little noses.”
“O, dear!” sighed Frau
Van Winkle. “I wish I knew people!”
“By the time you do, you’ll
know the reason why, and be like all the rest.”
Hazel Ripwinkley went to Mrs. Hilman’s
school, with her cousin Helena. That was because
the school was a thoroughly good one; the best her
mother could learn of; not because it was kept in parlors
in Dorset Street, and there were girls there who came
from palaces west of the Common, in the grand avenues
and the ABC streets; nor did Hazel wear her best gray
and black velvet suit for every day, though the rich
colored poplins with their over-skirts and sashes,
and the gay ribbons for hair and neck made the long
green baize covered tables look like gardenplots with
beds of bloom, and quite extinguished with their brilliancy
the quiet, one skirted brown merino that she brushed
and folded every night, and put on with fresh linen
cuffs and collar every morning.
“It is an idiosyncrasy of Aunt
Frances,” Helena explained, with the grandest
phrase she could pick out of her “Synonymes,”
to cow down those who “wondered.”
Privately, Helena held long lamentations
with Hazel, going to and fro, about the party that
she could not have.
“I’m actually ashamed
to go to school. There isn’t a girl there,
who can pretend to have anything, that hasn’t
had some kind of a company this winter. I’ve
been to them all, and I feel real mean, sneaky.
What’s ‘next year?’ Mamma puts me
off with that. Poh? Next year they’ll
all begin again. You can’t skip birthdays.”
“I’ll tell you what!”
said Hazel, suddenly, inspired by much the same idea
that had occurred to Mrs. Ripwinkley; “I mean
to ask my mother to let me have a party!”
“You! Down in Aspen Street!
Don’t, for pity’s sake, Hazel!”
“I don’t believe but what
it could be done over again!” said Hazel, irrelevantly,
intent upon her own thought.
“It couldn’t be done once!
For gracious grandmother’s sake, don’t
think of it!” cried the little world-woman of
thirteen.
“It’s gracious grandmother’s
sake that made me think of it,” said Hazel,
laughing. “The way she used to do.”
“Why don’t you ask them
to help you hunt up old Noah, and all get back into
the ark, pigeons and all?”
“Well, I guess they had pretty
nice times there, any how; and if another big rain
comes, perhaps they’ll have to!”
Hazel did not intend her full meaning;
but there is many a faint, small prophecy hid under
a clover-leaf.
Hazel did not let go things; her little
witch-wand, once pointed, held its divining angle
with the might of magic until somebody broke ground.
“It’s awful!” Helena
declared to her mother and sisters, with tears of
consternation. “And she wants me to go round
with her and carry ‘compliments!’ It’ll
never be got over, never! I wish I
could go away to boarding-school!”
For Mrs. Ripwinkley had made up her
unsophisticated mind to try this thing; to put this
grain of a pure, potent salt, right into the seethe
and glitter of little Boston, and find out what it
would decompose or precipitate. For was not she
a mother, testing the world’s chalice for her
children? What did she care for the hiss and
the bubble, if they came?
She was wider awake than Mrs. Ledwith
knew; perhaps they who come down from the mountain
heights of long seclusion can measure the world’s
paces and changes better than they who have been hurried
in the midst of them, on and on, or round and round.
Worst of all, old Uncle Titus took it up.
It was funny, or it would
have been funny, reader, if anybody but you and I
and Rachel Froke knew exactly how, to watch
Uncle Titus as he kept his quiet eye on all these
things, the things that he had set going, and
read their revelations; sheltered, disguised, under
a character that the world had chosen to put upon him,
like Haroun Alraschid in the merchant’s cloak.
They took their tea with him, the
two families, every Sunday night.
Agatha Ledwith “filled him in” a pair of
slippers that very first Christmas; he sat there in
the corner with his old leather ones on, when they
came, and left them, for the most part, to their own
mutual entertainment, until the tea was ready.
It was a sort of family exchange; all the plans and
topics came up, particularly on the Ledwith side,
for Mrs. Ripwinkley was a good listener, and Laura
a good talker; and the fun, that you and
I and Rachel Froke could guess, yes, and
a good deal of unsuspected earnest, also, was
all there behind the old gentleman’s “Christian
Age,” as over brief mentions of sermons, or
words about books, or little brevities of family inquiries
and household news, broke small floods of excitement
like water over pebbles, as Laura and her daughters
discussed and argued volubly the matching and the flouncing
of a silk, or the new flowering and higher pitching
of a bonnet, since “they are wearing
everything all on the top, you know, and mine looks
terribly meek;” or else descanted diffusely on
the unaccountableness of the somebodies not having
called, or the bother and forwardness of the some-other-bodies
who had, and the eighty-three visits that were left
on the list to be paid, and “never being able
to take a day to sit down for anything.”
“What is it all for?”
Mrs. Ripwinkley would ask, over again, the same old
burden of the world’s weariness falling upon
her from her sister’s life, and making her feel
as if it were her business to clear it away somehow.
“Why, to live!” Mrs. Ledwith
would reply. “You’ve got it all to
do, you see.”
“But I don’t really see,
Laura, where the living comes in.”
Laura opens her eyes.
“Slang?” says she. “Where
did you get hold of that?”
“Is it slang? I’m sure I don’t
know. I mean it.”
“Well, you are the funniest!
You don’t catch anything. Even a
by-word must come first-hand from you, and mean something!”
“It seems to me such a hard-working,
getting-ready-to-be, and then not being. There’s
no place left for it, because it’s
all place.”
“Gracious me, Frank! If
you are going to sift everything so, and get back
of everything! I can’t live in metaphysics:
I have to live in the things themselves, amongst other
people.”
“But isn’t it scene and
costume, a good deal of it, without the play?
It may be that I don’t understand, because I
have not got into the heart of your city life; but
what comes of the parties, for instance? The
grand question, beforehand, is about wearing, and then
there’s a retrospection of what was worn, and
how people looked. It seems to be all surface.
I should think they might almost send in their best
gowns, or perhaps a photograph, if photographs
ever were becoming, as they do visiting
cards.”
“Aunt Frank,” said Desire,
“I don’t believe the ‘heart of city
life’ is in the parties, or the parlors.
I believe there’s a great lot of us knocking
round amongst the dry goods and the furniture that
never get any further. People must be living,
somewhere, behind the fixings. But there
are so many people, nowadays, that have never quite
got fixed!”
“You might live all your days
here,” said Mrs. Ledwith to her sister, passing
over Desire, “and never get into the heart of
it, for that matter, unless you were born into it.
I don’t care so much, for my part. I know
plenty of nice people, and I like to have things nice
about me, and to have a pleasant time, and to let my
children enjoy themselves. The ‘heart,’
if the truth was known, is a dreadful still place.
I’m satisfied.”
Uncle Titus’s paper was folded
across the middle; just then he reversed the lower
half; that brought the printing upside down; but he
went on reading all the same.
“I’m going to have
a real party,” said Hazel, “a real, gracious-grandmother
party; just such as you and mother had, Aunt Laura,
when you were little.”
Her Aunt Laura laughed good-naturedly.
“I guess you’ll have to
go round and knock up the grandmothers to come to
it, then,” said she. “You’d
better make it a fancy dress affair at once, and then
it will be accounted for.”
“No; I’m going round to
invite; and they are to come at four, and take tea
at six; and they’re just to wear their afternoon
dresses; and Miss Craydocke is coming at any rate;
and she knows all the old plays, and lots of new ones;
and she is going to show how.”
“I’m coming, too,”
said Uncle Titus, over his newspaper, with his eyes
over his glasses.
“That’s good,” said
Hazel, simply, least surprised of any of the conclave.
“And you’ll have to play
the muffin man. ‘O, don’t you know,’” she
began to sing, and danced two little steps toward Mr.
Oldways. “O, I forgot it was Sunday!”
she said, suddenly stopping.
“Not much wonder,” said
Uncle Titus. “And not much matter. Your
Sunday’s good enough.”
And then he turned his paper right side up; but, before he
began really to read again, he swung half round toward them in his swivel-chair,
and said,
“Leave the sugar-plums to me,
Hazel; I’ll come early and bring ’em in
my pocket.”
“It’s the first thing
he’s taken the slightest notice of, or interest
in, that any one of us has been doing,” said
Agatha Ledwith, with a spice of momentary indignation,
as they walked along Bridgeley Street to take the
car.
For Uncle Titus had not come to the
Ledwith party. “He never went visiting,
and he hadn’t any best coat,” he told Laura,
in verbal reply to the invitation that had come written
on a square satin sheet, once folded, in an envelope
with a big monogram.
“It’s of no consequence,”
said Mrs. Ledwith, “any way. Only a child’s
play.”
“But it will be, mother; you
don’t know,” said Helena. “She’s
going right in everywhere, with that ridiculous little
invitation; to the Ashburnes and the Geoffreys, and
all! She hasn’t the least idea of any difference;
and just think what the girls will say, and how they
will stare, and laugh! I wish she wasn’t
my cousin!”
“Helena!”
Mrs. Ledwith spoke with real displeasure;
for she was good-natured and affectionate in her way;
and her worldly ambitions were rather wide than high,
as we have seen.
“Well, I can’t help it;
you don’t know, mother,” Helena repeated.
“It’s horrid to go to school with all those
stiffies, that don’t care a snap for you, and
only laugh.”
“Laughing is vulgar,”
said Agatha. If any indirect question were ever
thrown upon the family position, Agatha immediately
began expounding the ethics of high breeding, as one
who had attained.
It is only half-way people who laugh, she said. Ada
Geoffrey and Lilian Ashburne never laugh at
anybody I am sure.”
“No, they don’t; not right
out. They’re awfully polite. But you
can feel it, underneath. They have a way of keeping
so still, when you know they would laugh if they did
anything.”
“Well, they’ll neither
laugh nor keep still, about this. You need not
be concerned. They’ll just not go, and that
will be the end of it.”
Agatha Ledwith was mistaken.
She had been mistaken about two things to-night.
The other was when she had said that this was the first
time Uncle Oldways had noticed or been interested in
anything they did.