Read CHAPTER XII of Real Folks, free online book, by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, on ReadCentral.com.

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!”