CRUMBS
Desire Ledwith was, at this epoch,
a perplexity and a worry, even a positive
terror sometimes, to her mother.
It was not a case of the hen hatching
ducks, it was rather as if a hen had got a hawk in
her brood.
Desire’s demurs and questions, her
dissatisfactions, sittings and contempts, threatened
now and then to swoop down upon the family life and
comfort with destroying talons.
“She’ll be an awful, strong-minded,
radical, progressive, overturning woman,” Laura
said, in despair, to her friend Mrs. Megilp.
“And Greenley Street, and Aspen Street, and that
everlasting Miss Craydocke, are making her worse.
And what can I do? Because there’s Uncle.”
Right before Desire, not
knowing the cloud of real bewilderment that was upon
her young spiritual perceptions, getting their first
glimpse of a tangled and conflicting and distorted
world, she drew wondering comparisons between
her elder children and this odd, anxious, restless,
sharp-spoken girl.
“I don’t understand it,”
she would say. “It isn’t a bit like
a child of mine. I always took things easy, and
got the comfort of them somehow; I think the world
is a pretty pleasant place to live in, and there’s
lots of satisfaction to be had; and Agatha and Florence
take after me; they are nice, good-natured, contented
girls; managing their allowances, that
I wish were more, trimming their own bonnets,
and enjoying themselves with their friends, girl-fashion.”
Which was true. Agatha and Florence
were neither fretful nor dissatisfied; they were never
disrespectful, perhaps because Mrs. Ledwith demanded
less of deferential observance than of a kind of jolly
companionship from her daughters; a go-and-come easiness
in and out of what they called their home, but which
was rather the trimming-up and outfitting place, a
sort of Holmes’ Hole, where they
put in spring and fall, for a thorough overhaul and
rig; and at other times, in intervals or emergencies,
between their various and continual social trips and
cruises. They were hardly ever all-togetherish,
as Desire had said, if they ever were, it was over
house cleaning and millinery; when the ordering was
complete, when the wardrobes were finished, then
the world was let in, or they let themselves out,
and “looked.”
“Desire is different,”
said Mrs. Ledwith. “She’s like Grant’s
father, and her Aunt Desire, pudgicky and
queer.”
“Well, mamma,” said the
child, once, driven to desperate logic for defense,
“I don’t see how it can be helped.
If you will marry into the Ledwith family,
you can’t expect to have your children all Shieres!”
Which, again, was very true.
Laura laughed at the clever sharpness of it, and was
more than half proud of her bold chick-of-prey, after
all.
Yet Desire remembered that her Aunt
Frances was a Shiere, also; and she thought there
might easily be two sides to the same family; why
not, since there were two sides still further back,
always? There was Uncle Titus; who knew but it
was the Oldways streak in him after all?
Desire took refuge, more and more,
with Miss Craydocke, and Rachel Froke, and the Ripwinkleys;
she even went to Luclarion with questions, to get
her quaint notions of things; and she had ventured
into Uncle Titus’s study, and taken down volumes
of Swedenborg to pry into, while he looked at her
with long keen regards over his spectacles, and she
did not know that she was watched.
“That young girl, Desire, is
restless, Titus,” Rachel Froke said to him one
day. “She is feeling after something; she
wants something real to do; and it appears likely
to me that she will do it, if they don’t take
care.”
After that, Uncle Titus fixed his attention upon her yet more
closely; and at this time Desire stumbled upon things in a strange way among his
bookshelves, and thought that Rachel Froke was growing less precise in her
fashion of putting to rights. Books were tucked in beside each other as if they
had been picked up and bestowed anyhow; between Heaven and Hell and the Four
Leading Doctrines, she found, one day, Macdonalds Unspoken Sermons, and
there was a leaf doubled lengthwise in the chapter about the White Stone and the
New Name. Another time, a little book of poems, by the same author, was slid in,
open, over the volumes of Darwin and Huxley, and the pages upon whose outspread
faces it lay were those that bore the rhyme of the blind Bartimeus:
“O Jesus Christ!
I am deaf and blind;
Nothing comes through into my mind,
I only am not dumb:
Although I see Thee not, nor hear,
I cry because Thou mayst be near
O Son of Mary! come!”
Do you think a girl of seventeen may
not be feeling out into the spiritual dark, may
not be stretching helpless hands, vaguely, toward
the Hands that help? Desire Ledwith laid the book
down again, with a great swelling breath coming up
slowly out of her bosom, and with a warmth of tears
in her earnest little eyes. And Uncle Titus Oldways
sat there among his papers, and never moved, or seemed
to look, but saw it all.
He never said a word to her himself; it was not Uncle Tituss
way to talk, and few suspected him of having anything to say in such matters;
but he went to Friend Froke and asked her,
“Haven’t you got any light
that might shine a little for that child, Rachel?”
And the next Sunday, in the forenoon,
Desire came in; came in, without knowing it, for her
little light.
She had left home with the family
on their way to church; she was dressed in her buff
silk pongee suit trimmed with golden brown bands and
quillings; she had on a lovely new brown hat with tea
roses in it; her gloves and boots were exquisite and
many buttoned; Agatha and Florence could not think
what was the matter when she turned back, up Dorset
Street, saying suddenly, “I won’t go, after
all.” And then she had walked straight
over the hill and down to Greenley Street, and came
in upon Rachel, sitting alone in a quiet gray parlor
that was her own, where there were ferns and ivies
in the window, and a little canary, dressed in brown
and gold like Desire herself, swung over them in a
white wire cage.
When Desire saw how still it was,
and how Rachel Froke sat there with her open window
and her open book, all by herself, she stopped in
the doorway with a sudden feeling of intrusion, which
had not occurred to her as she came.
“It’s just what I want
to come into; but if I do, it won’t be there.
I’ve no right to spoil it. Don’t mind,
Rachel. I’ll go away.”
She said it softly and sadly, as if
she could not help it, and was turning back into the
hall.
“But I do mind,” said
Rachel, speaking quickly. “Thee will come
in, and sit down. Whatever it is thee wants,
is here for thee. Is it the stillness? Then
we will be still.”
“That’s so easy to say.
But you can’t do it for me. You will be
still, and I shall be all in a stir. I want so
to be just hushed up!”
“Fed, and hushed up, in somebody’s
arms, like a baby. I know,” said Rachel
Froke.
“How does she know?” thought
Desire; but she only looked at her with surprised
eyes, saying nothing.
Hungry and restless; thats what we all are, said Rachel
Froke, until
“Well, until?”
demanded the strange girl, impetuously, as Rachel
paused. “I’ve been hungry ever since
I was born, mother says.”
“Until He takes us up and feeds us.”
“Why don’t He? Mrs.
Froke, when does He give it out? Once a month,
in church, they have the bread and the wine? Does
that do it?”
“Thee knows we do not hold by
ordinances, we Friends,” said Rachel. “But
He gives the bread of life. Not once a month,
or in any place; it is his word. Does thee get
no word when thee goes to church? Does nothing
come to thee?”
“I don’t know; it’s
mixed up; the church is full of bonnets; and people
settle their gowns when they come in, and shake out
their hitches and puffs when they go out, and there’s
professional music at one end, and I suppose
it’s because I’m bad, but I don’t
know; half the time it seems to me it’s only
Mig at the other. Something all fixed up, and
patted down, and smoothed over, and salted and buttered,
like the potato hills they used to make on my plate
for me at dinner, when I was little. But it’s
soggy after all, and has an underground taste.
It isn’t anything that has just grown, up in
the light, like the ears of corn they rubbed in their
hands. Breakfast is better than dinner.
Bread, with yeast in it, risen up new. They don’t
feed with bread very often.”
“The yeast in the bread, and
the sparkle in the wine they are the life of it; they
are what make the signs.”
“If they only gave it out fresh,
and a little of it! But they keep it over, and
it grows cold and tough and flat, and people sit round
and pretend, but they don’t eat. They’ve
eaten other things, all sorts of trash, before
they came. They’ve spoiled their appetites.
Mine was spoiled, to-day. I felt so new and fussy,
in these brown things. So I turned round, and
came here.”
Mr. Oldways saying came back into Mrs. Frokes mind:
“Haven’t you got any light,
Rachel, that might shine a little for that child?”
Perhaps that was what the child had come for.
What had the word of the Spirit been
to Rachel Froke this day? The new, fresh word,
with the leaven in it? “A little of it;”
that was what she wanted.
Rachel took up the small red Bible
that lay on the lightstand beside her.
“I’ll will give thee my
First-Day crumb, Desire,” she said. “It
may taste sweet to thee.”
She turned to Revelation, seventh chapter.
Look over with me; thee will see then where the crumb is,
she said; and as Desire came near and looked over her upon the page, she read
from the last two verses:
“They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any
more.
“For the Tenderness that
is in the midst of the Almightiness shall feed
them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of
water; and God shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes.”
Her voice lingered over the words
she put for the “Lamb” and the “Throne,”
so that she said “Tenderness” with its
own very yearning inflection, and “Almightiness”
with a strong fullness, glad in that which can never
fall short or be exhausted. Then she softly laid
over the cover, and sat perfectly still. It was
the Quaker silence that falls upon them in their assemblies,
leaving each heart to itself and that which the Spirit
has given.
Desire was hushed all through; something
living and real had thrilled into her thought; her
restlessness quieted suddenly under it, as Mary stood
quiet before the message of the angel.
When she did speak again, after a time, as Rachel Froke broke
the motionless pause by laying the book gently back again upon the table, it was
to say,
“Why don’t they preach
like that, and leave the rest to preach itself?
A Sermon means a Word; why don’t they just say
the word, and let it go?”
The Friend made no reply.
“I never could quite like
that about the ‘Lamb,’ before,” said
Desire, hesitatingly. “It seemed, I
don’t know, putting Him down,
somehow; making him tame; taking the grandness away
that made the gentleness any good. But, ’Tenderness;’
that is beautiful! Does it mean so in the other
place? About taking away the sins, do
you think?”
“’The Tenderness of God the
Compassion that taketh away the sins of
the world?’” Mrs. Froke repeated, half
inquiringly. “Jesus Christ, God’s
Heart of Love toward man? I think it is so.
I think, child, thee has got thy crumb also, to-day.”
But not all yet.
Pretty soon, they heard the front
door open, and Uncle Titus come in. Another step
was behind his; and Kenneth Kincaid’s voice was
speaking, about some book he had called to take.
Desire’s face flushed, and her
manner grew suddenly flurried.
“I must go,” she said,
starting up; yet when she got to the door, she paused
and delayed.
The voices were talking on, in the
study; somehow, Desire had last words also, to say
to Mrs. Froke.
She was partly shy about going past
that open door, and partly afraid they might not notice
her if she did. Back in her girlish thought was
a secret suggestion that she was pushing at all the
time with a certain self-scorn and denial, that it
might happen that she and Kenneth Kincaid would go
out at the same moment; if so, he would walk up the
street with her, and Kenneth Kincaid was one of the
few persons whom Desire Ledwith thoroughly believed
in and liked. “There was no Mig about him,”
she said. It is hazardous when a girl of seventeen
makes one of her rare exceptions in her estimate of
character in favor of a man of six and twenty.
Yet Desire Ledwith hated “nonsense;”
she wouldn’t have anybody sending her bouquets
as they did to Agatha and Florence; she had an utter
contempt for lavender pantaloons and waxed moustaches;
but for Kenneth Kincaid, with his honest, clear look
at life, and his high strong purpose, to say friendly
things, tell her a little now and then
of how the world looked to him and what it demanded, this
lifted her up; this made it seem worth while to speak
and to hear.
So she was very glad when Uncle Titus
saw her go down the hall, after she had made up her
mind that that way lay her straight path, and that
things contrived were not things worth happening, and
spoke out her name, so that she had to stop, and turn
to the open doorway and reply; and Kenneth Kincaid
came over and held out his hand to her. He had
two books in the other, a volume of Bunsen
and a copy of “Guild Court,” and
he was just ready to go.
“Not been to church to-day?”
said Uncle Titus to Desire.
“I’ve been to Friend’s
Meeting,” the girl answered.
“Get anything by that?”
he asked, gruffly, letting the shag down over his
eyes that behind it beamed softly.
“Yes; a morsel,” replied Desire.
“All I wanted.”
“All you wanted? Well, that’s a Sunday-full!”
“Yes, sir, I think it is,” said she.
When they got out upon the sidewalk,
Kenneth Kincaid asked, “Was it one of the morsels
that may be shared, Miss Desire? Some crumbs
multiply by dividing, you know.”
“It was only a verse out of the Bible, with
a new word in it.”
“A new word? Well, I think
Bible verses often have that. I suppose it was
what they were made for.”
Desire’s glance at him had a question in it.
“Made to look different at different
times, as everything does that has life in it.
Isn’t that true? Clouds, trees, faces, do
they ever look twice the same?”
“Yes,” said Desire, thinking
especially of the faces. “I think they
do, or ought to. But they may look more.”
“I didn’t say contradictory.
To look more, there must be a difference; a fresh
aspect. And that is what the world is full of;
and the world is the word of God.”
“The world?” said Desire,
who had been taught in a dried up, mechanical sort
of way, that the Bible is the word of God; and practically
left to infer that, that point once settled, it might
be safely shut, up between its covers and not much
meddled with, certainly not over freely interpreted.
“Yes. What God had to say.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.
Without him was not anything made that was made.”
Desire’s face brightened.
She knew those words by heart. They were the
first Sunday-school lesson she ever committed to memory,
out of the New Testament; “down to ‘grace
and truth,’” as she recollected.
What a jumble of repetitions it had been to her, then!
Sentences so much alike that she could not remember
them apart, or which way they came. All at once
the simple, beautiful meaning was given to her.
What God had to say.
And it took a world, millions, of worlds, to
say it with.
“And the Bible, too?”
she said, simply following out her own mental perception,
without giving the link. It was not needed.
They were upon one track.
“Yes; all things; and all souls.
The world-word comes through things; the Bible came
through souls. And it is all the more alive,
and full, and deep, and changing; like a river.”
“Living fountains of waters!
that was part of the morsel to-day,” Desire
repeated impulsively, and then shyly explained.
“And the new word?”
Desire shrunk into silence for a moment;
she was not used to, or fond of Bible quoting, or
even Bible talk; yet sin was hungering all the time
for Bible truth.
Mr. Kincaid waited.
So she repeated it presently; for
Desire never made a fuss; she was too really sensitive
for that.
“’The Tenderness in the
midst of the Almightiness shall feed them, and shall
lead them to living fountains of water.’”
Mr. Kincaid recognized the “new
word,” and his face lit up.
“‘The Lamb in the midst
of the Throne,’” he said. “Out
of the Heart of God, the Christ. Who was there
before; the intent by which all things were made.
The same yesterday, and to-day, and forever; who ever
liveth to make intercession for us. Christ had
to be. The Word, full of grace, must be made
flesh. Why need people dispute about Eternity
and Divinity, if they can only see that? Was
that Mrs. Froke’s reading?”
“Yes; that was Rachel’s sermon.”
“It is an illumination.”
They walked all up Orchard Street without another
word.
Then Kenneth Kincaid said, “Miss
Desire, why won’t you come and teach in the
Mission School?”
“I teach? Why, I’ve got everything
to learn!”
“But as fast as you do
learn; the morsels, you know. That is the way
they are given out. That is the wonder of the
kingdom of heaven. There is no need to go away
and buy three hundred pennyworth before we begin,
that every one may take a little; the bread given as
the Master breaks it feeds them till they are filled;
and there are baskets full of fragments to gather
up.”
Kenneth Kincaid’s heart was
in his Sunday work, as his sister had said. The
more gladly now, that the outward daily bread was being
given.
Mr. Geoffrey, one of those
busy men, so busy that they do promptly that which
their hands find to do, had put Kenneth
in the way of work. It only needed a word from
him, and the surveying and laying out of some new
streets and avenues down there where Boston is growing
so big and grand and strange, were put into his charge.
Kenneth was busy now, cheerily busy, from Monday morning
to Saturday night; and restfully busy on the Sunday,
straightening the paths and laying out the ways for
souls to walk in. He felt the harmony and the
illustration between his week and his Sunday, and the
one strengthening the other, as all true outward work
does harmonize with and show forth, and help the spiritual
doing. It could not have been so with that gold
work, or any little feverish hitching on to other
men’s business; producing nothing, advancing
nothing, only standing between to snatch what might
fall, or to keep a premium for passing from hand to
hand.
Our great cities are so full, our
whole country is so overrun, with these
officious middle-men whom the world does not truly
want; chiffonniers of trade, who only pick up a living
out of the great press and waste and overflow; and
our boys are so eager to slip in to some such easy,
ready-made opportunity, to get some crossing
to sweep.
What will come of it all, as the pretenses
multiply? Will there be always pennies for every
little broom? Will two, and three, and six sweeps
be tolerated between side and side? By and by,
I think, they will have to turn to and lay pavements.
Hard, honest work, and the day’s pay for it;
that is what we have got to go back to; that and the
day’s snug, patient living, which the pay achieves.
Then, as I say, the week shall illustrate
the Sunday, and the Sunday shall glorify the week;
and what men do and build shall stand true types,
again, for the inner growth and the invisible building;
so that if this outer tabernacle were dissolved, there
should be seen glorious behind it, the house not made
with hands, eternal.
As Desire Ledwith met this young Kenneth
Kincaid from day to day, seeing him so often at her
Aunt Ripwinkley’s, where he and Dorris went
in and out now, almost like a son and daughter, as
she walked beside him this morning, hearing him say
these things, at which the heart-longing in her burned
anew toward the real and satisfying, what
wonder was it that her restlessness grasped at that
in his life which was strong and full of rest; that
she felt glad and proud to have him tell his thought
to her; that without any silliness, despising
all silliness, she should yet be conscious,
as girls of seventeen are conscious, of something that
made her day sufficient when she had so met him, of
a temptation to turn into those streets in her walks
that led his way? Or that she often, with her
blunt truth, toward herself as well as others, and
her quick contempt of sham and subterfuge, should
snub herself mentally, and turn herself round as by
a grasp of her own shoulders, and make herself walk
off stoutly in a far and opposite direction, when,
without due need and excuse, she caught herself out
in these things?
What wonder that this stood in her
way, for very pleasantness, when Kenneth asked her
to come and teach in the school? That she was
ashamed to let herself do a thing even a
good thing, that her life needed, when
there was this conscious charm in the asking; this
secret thought that she should walk up home
with him every Sunday!
She remembered Agatha and Florence,
and she imagined, perhaps, more than they would really
have thought of it at home; and so as they turned
into Shubarton Place, for he had kept on
all the way along Bridgeley and up Dorset Street with
her, she checked her steps suddenly as they came near the door, and said
brusquely,
“No, Mr. Kincaid; I can’t
come to the Mission. I might learn A, and teach
them that; but how do I know I shall ever learn B,
myself?”
He had left his question, as their
talk went on, meaning to ask it again before they
separated. He thought it was prevailing with her,
and that the help that comes of helping others would
reach her need; it was for her sake he asked it; he
was disappointed at the sudden, almost trivial turn
she gave it.
“You have taken up another analogy,
Miss Desire,” he said. “We were talking
about crumbs and feeding. The five loaves and
the five thousand. ’Why reason ye because
ye have no bread? How is it that ye do not understand?’”
Kenneth quoted these words naturally,
pleasantly; as he might quote anything that had been
spoken to them both out of a love and authority they
both recognized, a little while ago.
But Desire was suddenly sharp and
fractious. If it had not touched some deep, live
place in her, she would not have minded so much.
It was partly, too, the coming toward home. She
had got away out of the pure, clear spaces where such
things seemed to be fit and unstrained, into the edge
of her earth atmosphere again, where, falling, they
took fire. Presently she would be in that ridiculous
pink room, and Glossy Megilp would be chattering about
“those lovely purple poppies with the black
grass,” that she had been lamenting all the
morning she had not bought for her chip hat, instead
of the pomegranate flowers. And Agatha would
be on the bed, in her cashmere sack, reading Miss
Braddon.
“It would sound nice to tell
them she was going down to the Mission School to give
out crumbs!”
Besides, I suppose that persons of
a certain temperament never utter a more ungracious
“No,” than when they are longing all the
time to say “Yes.”
So she turned round on the lower step to Kenneth, when he had
asked that grave, sweet question of the Lords, and said perversely,
“I thought you did not believe
in any brokering kind of business. It’s
all there, for everybody. Why should
I set up to fetch and carry?”
She did not look in his face as she
said it; she was not audacious enough to do that;
she poked with the stick of her sunshade between the
uneven bricks of the sidewalk, keeping her eyes down,
as if she watched for some truth she expected to pry
up. But she only wedged the stick in so that
she could not get it out; and Kenneth Kincaid making
her absolutely no answer at all, she had to stand there,
growing red and ashamed, held fast by her own silly
trap.
“Take care; you will break it,”
said Kenneth, quietly, as she gave it a twist and
a wrench. And he put out his hand, and took it
from hers, and drew gently upward in the line in which
she had thrust it in.
“You were bearing off at an
angle. It wanted a straight pull.”
“I never pull straight at anything.
I always get into a crook, somehow. You didn’t
answer me, Mr. Kincaid. I didn’t mean to
be rude or wicked. I didn’t
mean
“What you said. I know
that; and it’s no use to answer what people
don’t mean. That makes the crookedest crook
of all.”
“But I think I did mean it partly;
only not contrarimindedly. I do mean that I have
no business yet awhile. It would only
be Migging at gospel!”
And with this remarkable application
of her favorite illustrative expression, she made
a friendly but abrupt motion of leave-taking, and
went into the house.
Up into her own room, in the third
story, where the old furniture was, and no “fadging,” and
sat down, bonnet, gloves, sunshade, and all, in her
little cane rocking-chair by the window.
Helena was down in the pink room,
listening with charmed ears to the grown up young-ladyisms
of her elder sisters and Glossy Megilp.
Desire sat still until the dinner-bell rang, forgetful of her
dress, forgetful of all but one thought that she spoke out as she rose at last
at the summons to take off her things in a hurry,
“I wonder, I wonder if
I shall ever live anything all straight out!”