“SESAME AND LILIES
“I’ve got a discouragement
at my stomach,” said Luclarion Grapp.
“What’s the matter?” asked Mrs.
Ripwinkley, naturally.
“Mrs. Scarup. I’ve been there.
There ain’t any bottom to it.”
“Well?”
Mrs. Ripwinkley knew that Luclarion
had more to say, and that she waited for this monosyllable.
“She’s sick again.
And Scarup, he’s gone out West, spending a hundred
dollars to see whether or no there’s a chance
anywhere for a smart man, and that
ain’t he, so it’s a double waste, to
make fifty. No girl; and the children all under
foot, and Pinkie looking miserable over the dishes.”
“Pinkie isn’t strong.”
“No. She’s powerful
weak. I just wish you’d seen that dirty
settin’-room fire-place; looks as if it hadn’t
been touched since Scarup smoked his pipe there, the
night before he went off a wild-gandering. And
clo’es to be ironed, and the girl cleared out,
because ‘she’d always been used to fust-class
families.’ There wasn’t anything
to your hand, and you couldn’t tell where to
begin, unless you began with a cataplasm!”
Luclarion had heard, by chance, of
a cataclysm, and that was what she meant.
“It wants creation,
over again! Mrs. Scarup hadn’t any fit
breakfast; there was burnt toast, made out of tough
bread, that she’d been trying to eat; and a
cup of tea, half drunk; something the matter with
that, I presume. I’d have made her some
gruel, if there’d been a fire; and if there’d
been any kindlings, I’d have made her a fire;
but there ’twas; there wasn’t any bottom
to it!”
“You had better make the gruel here, Luclarion.”
“That’s what I come back for. But Mrs.
Ripwinkley!”
“Well?”
“Don’t it appear to you
it’s a kind of a stump? I don’t want
to do it just for the satisfaction; though it would
be a satisfaction to plough everything up thorough,
and then rake it over smooth; what do you think?”
“What have you thought, Luclarion? Something,
of course.”
“She wants a real smart girl for
two dollars a week. She can’t get her,
because she ain’t. And I kind of felt as
though I should like to put in. Seemed to me
it was a but there! I haven’t
any right to stump you.”
“Wouldn’t it be rather
an aggravation? I don’t suppose you would
mean to stay altogether?”
“Not unless but don’t
go putting it into my head, Mrs. Ripwinkley.
I shall feel as if I was. And I don’t
think it goes quite so far as that, yet. We ain’t
never stumped to more than one thing at a time.
What she wants is to be straightened out. And
when things once looked my way, she might get
a girl, you see. Anyhow, ’twould encourage
Pinkie, and kind of set her going. Pinkie likes
things nice; but it’s such a Hoosac tunnel to
undertake, that she just lets it all go, and gets
off up-stairs, and sticks a ribbon in her hair.
That’s all she can do. I s’pose
’twould take a fortnight, maybe?”
“Take it, Luclarion,”
said Mrs. Ripwinkley, smiling. Luclarion understood
the smile.
“I s’pose you think it’s
as good as took. Well, perhaps it is spoke
for. But it wasn’t me, you know. Now
what’ll you do?”
“Go into the kitchen and make the pudding.”
“But then?”
“We are not stumped for then, you know.”
“There was a colored girl here
yesterday, from up in Garden Street, asking if there
was any help wanted. I think she came in partially,
to look at the flowers; the ’sturtiums are
splendid, and I gave her some. She was awfully
dressed up, for colors, I mean; but she
looked clean and pleasant, and spoke bright. Maybe
she’d come, temporary. She seemed taken
with things. I know where to find her, and I
could go there when I got through with the gruel.
Mrs. Scarup must have that right off.”
And Luclarion hurried away.
It was not the first time Mrs. Ripwinkley
had lent Luclarion; but Miss Grapp had not found a
kitchen mission in Boston heretofore. It was
something new to bring the fashion of simple, prompt,
neighborly help down intact from the hills, and apply
it here to the tangle of city living, that is made
up of so many separate and unrecognized struggles.
When Hazel came home from school,
she went all the way up the garden walk, and in at
the kitchen door. “That was the way she
took it all,” she said; “first the flowers,
and then Luclarion and what they had for dinner, and
a drink of water; and then up-stairs, to mother.”
To-day she encountered in the kitchen
a curious and startling apparition of change.
A very dusky brown maiden, with a
petticoat of flashing purple, and a jacket of crimson,
and extremely puzzling hair tied up with knots of
corn color, stood in possession over the stove, tending
a fricassee, of which Hazel recognized at once the
preparation and savor as her mother’s; while
beside her on a cricket, munching cold biscuit and
butter with round, large bites of very white little
teeth, sat a small girl of five of the same color,
gleaming and twinkling as nothing human ever does
gleam and twinkle but a little darkie child.
“Where is Luclarion?”
asked Hazel, standing still in the middle of the floor,
in her astonishment.
“I don’t know. I’m
Damaris, and this one’s little Vash. Don’t
go for callin’ me Dam, now; the boys did that
in my last place, an’ I left, don’ yer
see? I ain’t goin’ to be swore to,
anyhow!”
And Damaris glittered at Hazel, with
her shining teeth and her quick eyes, full of fun
and good humor, and enjoyed her end of the joke extremely.
“Have you come to stay?” asked
Hazel.
“‘Course. I don’ mostly come
for to go.”
“What does it mean, mother?”
Hazel asked, hurrying up into her mother’s room.
And then Mrs. Ripwinkley explained.
“But what is she? Black or white? Shes got
straight braids and curls at the back of her head, like everybodys
“‘Course,” said
a voice in the doorway. “An’ wool
on top, place where wool ought to grow, same’s
everybody, too.”
Damaris had come up, according to
orders, to report a certain point in the progress
of the fricassee.
“They all pulls the wool over
they eyes, now-days, an sticks the straight on behind.
Where’s the difference?”
Mrs. Ripwinkley made some haste to
rise and move toward the doorway, to go down stairs,
turning Damaris from her position, and checking further
remark. Diana and Hazel stayed behind, and laughed.
“What fun!” they said.
It was the beginning of a funny fortnight;
but it is not the fun I have paused to tell you of;
something more came of it in the home-life of the
Ripwinkleys; that which they were “waiting to
see.”
Damaris wanted a place where she could
take her little sister; she was tired of leaving her
“shyin’ round,” she said. And
Vash, with her round, fuzzy head, her bright eyes,
her little flashing teeth, and her polished mahogany
skin, darting up and down the house “on
Aarons,” or for mere play, dressed
in her gay little scarlet flannel shirt-waist, and
black and orange striped petticoat, was
like some “splendid, queer little fire-bug,”
Hazel said, and made a surprise and a picture wherever
she came. She was “cute,” too, as
Damaris had declared beforehand; she was a little wonder
at noticing and remembering, and for all sorts of
handiness that a child of five could possibly be put
to.
Hazel dressed rag babies for her,
and made her a soap-box baby-house in the corner of
the kitchen, and taught her her letters; and began
to think that she should hate to have her go when Luclarion
came back.
Damaris proved clever and teachable
in the kitchen; and had, above all, the rare and admirable
disposition to keep things scrupulously as she had
found them; so that Luclarion, in her afternoon trips
home, was comforted greatly to find that while she
was “clearing and ploughing” at Mrs. Scarup’s,
her own garden of neatness was not being turned into
a howling wilderness; and she observed, as is often
done so astutely, that “when you do find
a neat, capable, colored help, it’s as good
help as you can have.” Which you may notice
is just as true without the third adjective as with.
Luclarion herself was having a splendid time.
The first thing she did was to announce
to Mrs. Scarup that she was out of her place for two
weeks, and would like to come to her at her wages;
which Mrs. Scarup received with some such awed and
unbelieving astonishment as she might have done the
coming of a legion of angels with Gabriel at their
head. And when one strong, generous human will,
with powers of brain and body under it sufficient
to some good work, comes down upon it as Luclarion
did upon hers, there is what Gabriel and his
angels stand for, and no less sent of God.
The second thing Luclarion did was
to clean that “settin’-room fire-place,”
to restore the pleasant brown color of its freestone
hearth and jambs, to polish its rusty brasses till
they shone like golden images of gods, and to lay
an ornamental fire of chips and clean little sticks
across the irons. Then she took a wet broom and
swept the carpet three times, and dusted everything
with a damp duster; and then she advised Mrs. Scarup,
whom the gruel had already cheered and strengthened,
to be “helped down, and sit there in the easy-chair,
for a change, and let her take her room in hand.”
And no doctor ever prescribed any change with better
effect. There are a good many changes that might
be made for people, without sending them beyond their
own doors. But it isn’t the doctors who
always know what change, or would dare to prescribe
it if they did.
Mrs. Scarup was “helped down,”
it seemed, really up, rather, into
a new world. Things had begun all over again.
It was worth while to get well, and take courage.
Those brasses shone in her face like morning suns.
“Well, I do declare to Man,
Miss Grapp!” she exclaimed; and breath and expression
failed together, and that was all she could say.
Up-stairs, Luclarion swept and rummaged.
She found the sheet and towel drawers, and made everything
white and clean. She laid fresh napkins over
the table and bureau tops, and set the little things boxes,
books, what not, daintily about on them.
She put a clean spread on the bed, and gathered up
things for the wash she meant to have, with a recklessness
that Mrs. Scarup herself would never have dared to
use, in view of any “help” she ever expected
to do it.
And then, with Pinkie to lend feeble
assistance, Luclarion turned to in the kitchen.
It was a “clear treat,”
she told Mrs. Ripwinkley afterward. “Things
had got to that state of mussiness, that you just began
at one end and worked through to the other, and every
inch looked new made over after you as you went along.”
She put the children out into the
yard on the planks, and gave them tin pans and clothes-pins
to keep house with, and gingerbread for their dinner.
She and Pinkie had cups of tea, and Mrs. Scarup had
her gruel, and went up to bed again; and that was another
new experience, and a third stage in her treatment
and recovery.
When it came to the cellar, Luclarion
got the chore-man in; and when all was done, she looked
round on the renovated home, and said within herself,
“If Scarup, now, will only break his neck, or
get something to do, and stay away with his pipes
and his boots and his contraptions!”
And Scarup did. He found a chance
in some freight-house, and wrote that he had made
up his mind to stay out there all winter; and Mrs.
Scarup made little excursions about the house with
her returning strength, and every journey was a pleasure-trip,
and the only misery was that at the end of the fortnight
Miss Grapp was going away, and then she should be
“all back in the swamp again.”
“No, you won’t,”
said Luclarion; “Pinkie’s waked up, and
she’s going to take pride, and pick up after
the children. She can do that, now; but she couldn’t
shoulder everything. And you’ll have somebody
in the kitchen. See if you don’t.
I’ve ’most a mind to say I’ll stay
till you do.”
Luclarion’s faith was strong;
she knew, she said, that “if she was doing at
her end, Providence wasn’t leaving off at his.
Things would come round.”
This was how they did come round.
It only wanted a little sorting about.
The pieces of the puzzle were all there. Hazel
Ripwinkley settled the first little bit in the right
place. She asked her mother one night, if she
didn’t think they might begin their beehive
with a fire-fly? Why couldn’t they keep
little Vash?
“And then,” said Diana,
in her quiet way, slipping one of the big three-cornered
pieces of the puzzle in, “Damaris might go to
Mrs. Scarup for her two dollars a week. She is
willing to work for that, if she can get Vash taken.
And this would be all the same, and better.”
Desire was with them when Luclarion
came in, and heard it settled.
“How is it that things always
fall right together for you, so? How came
Damaris to come along?”
“You just take hold of something
and try,” said Luclarion. “You’ll
find there’s always a working alongside.
Put up your sails, and the wind will fill ’em.”
Uncle Titus wanted to know “what
sort of use a thing like that could be in a house?”
He asked it in his very surliest fashion.
If they had had any motives of fear or favor, they
would have been disconcerted, and begun to think they
had made a mistake.
But Hazel spoke up cheerily,
“Why, to wait on people, uncle.
She’s the nicest little fetch-and-carrier you
ever saw!”
“Humph! who wants to be waited
on, here? You girls, with feet and hands of your
own? Your mother doesn’t, I know.”
“Well, to wait on, then,”
says Hazel, boldly. “I’m making her
a baby-house, and teaching her to read; and Diana
is knitting scarlet stockings for her, to wear this
winter. We like it.”
“O, if you like it! That’s
always a reason. I only want to have people give
the real one.”
And Uncle Titus walked off, so that
nobody could tell whether he liked it or not.
Nobody told him anything about the
Scarups. But do you suppose he didn’t know?
Uncle Titus Oldways was as sharp as he was blunt.
“I guess I know, mother,”
said Hazel, a little while after this, one day, “how
people write stories.”
“Well?” asked her mother,
looking up, ready to be amused with Hazel’s
deep discovery.
“If they can just begin with
one thing, you see, that makes the next one.
It can’t help it, hardly. Just as it does
with us. What made me think of it was, that it
seemed to me there was another little piece of our
beehive story all ready to put on; and if we went and
did it, I wonder if you wouldn’t,
mother? It fits exactly.”
“Let me see.”
“That little lame Sulie at Miss
Craydocke’s Home, that we like so much.
Nobody adopts her away, because she is lame; her legs
are no use at all, you know, and she just sits all
curled up in that great round chair that Mrs. Geoffrey
gave her, and sews patchwork, and makes paper dolls.
And when she drops her scissors, or her thread, somebody
has to come and pick it up. She wants waiting
on; she just wants a little lightning-bug, like Vash,
to run round for her all the time. And we don’t,
you see; and we’ve got Vash! And Vash likes
paper dolls.”
Hazel completed the circle of her
argument with great triumph.
“An extra piece of bread to
finish your too much butter,” said Diana.
“Yes. Doesn’t it
just make out?” said Hazel, abating not a jot
of her triumph, and taking things literally, as nobody
could do better than she, upon occasion, for all her
fancy and intuition.
“I wonder what Uncle Oldways
would say to that,” said Diana.
“He’d say ‘Faugh,
faugh!’ But he doesn’t mean faugh, faugh,
half the time. If he does, he doesn’t stick
to it. Mother,” she asked rather suddenly,
“do you think Uncle Oldways feels as if we oughtn’t
to do other things with his
money?”
“What other things?”
“Why, these others.
Vash, and Sulie, perhaps. Wouldn’t he like
it if we turned his house into a Beehive?”
“It isn’t his house,”
said Mrs. Ripwinkley, “He has given it to me.”
“Well, do you feel ‘obligated,’
as Luclarion says?’
“In a certain degree, yes.
I feel bound to consider his comfort and wishes, as
far as regards his enjoyment with us, and fulfilling
what he reasonably looked for when he brought us here.”
“Would that interfere?”
“Suppose you ask him, Hazel?”
“Well, I could do that.”
“Hazel wouldn’t mind doing
anything!” said Diana, who, to tell the truth
was a little afraid of Uncle Titus, and who dreaded
of all things, being snubbed.
“Only,” said Hazel, to
whom something else had just occurred, “wouldn’t
he think wouldnt it be your
business?”
“It is all your plan, Hazel.
I think he would see that.”
“And you are willing, if he doesn’t care?”
“I did not quite say that. It would be
a good deal to think of.”
“Then I’ll wait till you’ve
thought,” said clear-headed little Hazel.
“But it fits right on.
I can see that. And Miss Craydocke said things
would, after we had begun.”
Mrs. Ripwinkley took it into her thoughts,
and carried it about with her for days, and considered
it; asking herself questions.
Was it going aside in search of an
undertaking that did not belong to her?
Was it bringing home a care, a responsibility,
for which they were not fitted, which might
interfere with the things they were meant, and would
be called, to do?
There was room and opportunity, doubtless,
for them to do something; Mrs. Ripwinkley had felt
this; she had not waited for her child to think of
it for her; she had only waited, in her new, strange
sphere, for circumstances to guide the way, and for
the Giver of all circumstance to guide her thought.
She chose, also, in the things that would affect her
children’s life and settle duties for them,
to let them grow also to those duties, and the perception
of them, with her. To this she led them, by all
her training and influence; and now that in Hazel,
her child of quick insight and true instincts, this
influence was bearing fruit and quickening to action,
she respected her first impulses; she believed in them;
they had weight with her, as argument in themselves.
These impulses, in young, true souls, freshly responding,
are, she knew, as the proof-impressions of God’s
Spirit.
Yet she would think; that was her
duty; she would not do a thing hastily, or unwisely.
Sulie Praile had been a good while, now, at the Home.
A terrible fall, years ago, had caused
a long and painful illness, and resulted in her present
helplessness. But above those little idle, powerless
limbs, that lay curled under the long, soft skirt
she wore, like a baby’s robe, were a beauty and
a brightness, a quickness of all possible motion,
a dexterous use of hands, and a face of gentle peace
and sometimes glory, that were like a benediction
on the place that she was in; like the very Holy Ghost
in tender form like a dove, resting upon it, and abiding
among them who were there.
In one way, it would hardly be so
much a giving as a taking, to receive her in.
Yet there was care to assume, the continuance of care
to promise or imply; the possibility of conflicting
plans in much that might be right and desirable that
Mrs. Ripwinkley should do for her own. Exactly
what, if anything, it would be right to undertake
in this, was matter for careful and anxious reflection.
The resources of the Home were not
very large; there were painful cases pressing their
claims continually, as fast as a little place was
vacated it could be filled; was wanted, ten times over;
and Sulie Praile had been there a good while.
If somebody would only take her, as people were very
ready to take away to happy, simple, comfortable
country homes, for mere childhood’s sake the
round, rosy, strong, and physically perfect ones!
But Sulie must be lifted and tended; she must keep
somebody at home to look after her; no one could be
expected to adopt a child like that.
Yet Hazel Ripwinkley thought they
could be; thought, in her straightforward, uncounting
simplicity, that it was just the natural, obvious,
beautiful thing to do, to take her home into
a real home into pleasant family life;
where things would not crowd; where she could be mothered
and sistered, as girls ought to be, when there are
so many nice places in the world, and not so many people
in them as there might be. When there could be
so much visiting, and spare rooms kept always in everybody’s
house, why should not somebody who needed to, just
come in and stay? What were the spare places
made for?
“We might have Sulie for this
winter,” said Mrs. Ripwinkley, at last.
“They would let her come to us for that time;
and it would be a change for her, and leave a place
for others. Then if anything made it impossible
for us to do more, we should not have raised an expectation
to be disappointed. And if we can and ought to
do more, it will be shown us by that time more certainly.”
She asked Miss Craydocke about it,
when she came home from Z that
fall. She had been away a good deal lately; she
had been up to Z to two weddings, Leslie
Goldthwaite’s and Barbara Holabird’s.
Now she was back again, and settled down.
Miss Craydocke thought it a good thing wisely limited.
“Sulie needs to be with older
girls; there is no one in the Home to be companion
to her; the children are almost all little. A
winter here would be a blessing to her!”
“But the change again, if she
should have to make it?” suggested Mrs. Ripwinkley.
“Good things don’t turn
to bad ones because you can’t have them any
more. A thing you’re not fit for, and never
ought to have had, may; but a real good stays by;
it overflows all the rest. Sulie Praile’s
life could never be so poor again, after a winter here
with you, as it might be if she had never had it.
If you’d like her, let her come, and don’t
be a bit afraid. We’re only working by inches,
any of us; like the camel’s-hair embroiderers
in China. But it gets put together; and it is
beautiful, and large, and whole, somewhere.”
“Miss Craydocke always knows,” said Hazel.
Nobody said anything again, about
Uncle Titus. A winter’s plan need not be
referred to him. But Hazel, in her own mind, had
resolved to find out what was Uncle Titus’s,
generally and theoretically; how free they were to
be, beyond winter plans and visits of weeks; how much
scope they might have with this money and this house,
that seemed so ample to their simple wants, and what
they might do with it and turn it into, if it came
into their heads or hearts or consciences.
So one day she went in and sat down
by him in the study, after she had accomplished some
household errand with Rachel Froke.
Other people approached him with more
or less of strategy, afraid of the tiger in him; Desire
Ledwith faced him courageously; only Hazel came and
nestled up beside him, in his very cage, as if he were
no wild beast, after all.
Yet he pretended to growl, even at
her, sometimes; it was so funny to see her look up
and chirp on after it, like some little bird to whom
the language of beasts was no language at all, and
passed by on the air as a very big sound, but one
that in no wise concerned it.
“We’ve got Sulie Praile
to spend the winter, Uncle Titus,” she said.
“Who’s Sulie Praile?”
“The lame girl, from the Home.
We wanted somebody for Vash to wait on, you know.
She sits in a round chair, that twists, like yours;
and she’s just like a lily in a vase!”
Hazel finished her sentence with a simile quite unexpected
to herself.
There was something in Sulie’s
fair, pale, delicate face, and her upper figure, rising
with its own peculiar lithe, easily swayed grace from
among the gathered folds of the dress of her favorite
dark green color, that reminded if one thought
of it, and Hazel turned the feeling of it into a thought
at just this moment of a beautiful white
flower, tenderly and commodiously planted.
“Well, I suppose it’s
worth while to have a lame girl to sit up in a round
chair, and look like a lily in a vase, is it?”
“Uncle Titus, I want to know
what you think about some things.”
“That is just what I want to
know myself, sometimes. To find out what one
thinks about things, is pretty much the whole finding,
isn’t it?”
“Don’t be very metaphysical,
please, Uncle Titus. Don’t turn your eyes
round into the back of your head. That isn’t
what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just plain looking.”
“O!”
“Don’t you think, when
there are places, all nice and ready, and
people that would like the places and haven’t
got ’em, that the people ought to
be put into the places?”
“‘The shirtless backs put into the shirts?’”
“Why, yes, of course. What are shirts made
for?”
“For some people to have thirty-six,
and some not to have any,” said Mr. Oldways.
“No,” said Hazel.
“Nobody wants thirty-six, all at once. But
what I mean is, rooms, and corners, and pleasant windows,
and seats at the table; places where people come in
visiting, and that are kept saved up. I can’t
bear an empty box; that is, only for just one pleasant
minute, while I’m thinking what I can put into
it.”
“Where’s your empty box, now?”
“Our house was rather
empty-boxy. Uncle Titus, do you mind how we fill
it up, because you gave it to us, you know?”
“No. So long as you don’t crowd yourselves
out.”
“Or you, Uncle Titus. We
don’t want to crowd you out. Does it crowd
you any to have Sulie and Vash there, and to have us
‘took up’ with them, as Luclarion says?”
How straight Witch Hazel went to her point!
“Your catechism crowds me just
a little, child,” said Uncle Titus. “I
want to see you go your own way. That is what
I gave you the house for. Your mother knows that.
Did she send you here to ask me?”
“No. I wanted to know.
It was I that wanted to begin a kind of a Beehive like
Miss Craydocke’s. Would you care if it was
turned quite into a Beehive, finally?”
Hazel evidently meant to settle the
furthest peradventure, now she had begun.
“Ask your mother to show you
the deed. ’To Frances Ripwinkley, her heirs
and assigns,’ that’s you and
Diana, ’for their use and behoof,
forever.’ I’ve no more to do with
it.”
“‘Use, and behoof,’”
said Hazel, slowly. And then she turned the leaves
of the great Worcester that lay upon the study table,
and found “Behoof.”
“‘Profit, gain, benefit;’
then that’s what you meant; that we should make
as much more of it as we could. That’s what
I think, Uncle Titus. I’m glad you put
’behoof in.”
“They always put it in, child!”
“Do they? Well, then, they
don’t always work it out!” and Hazel laughed.
At that, Mr. Oldways pulled off his
spectacles, looked sharp at Hazel with two sharp,
brown eyes, set near together, Hazel noticed
for the first time, like Desire’s, let
the keenness turn gradually into a twinkle, suffered
the muscles that had held his lips so grim to relax,
and laughed too; his peculiar, up-and-down shake of
a laugh, in which head and shoulders made the motions,
as if he were a bottle, and there were a joke inside
of him which was to be well mixed up to be thoroughly
enjoyed.
“Go home to your mother, jade-hopper!”
he said, when he had done; “and tell her I’m
coming round to-night, to tea, amongst your bumble-bees
and your lilies!”