WITH ALL ONE’S MIGHT
Let the grapes be ever so sweet, and
hang in plenty ever so low, there is always a fair
bunch out of reach.
Mrs. Ledwith longed, now, to go to Europe.
At any rate, she was eager to have
her daughters go. But, after just one year, to
take what her Uncle Oldways had given her, in return
for her settling herself near him, and unsettle
herself, and go off to the other side of the world!
Besides, what he had given her would not do it.
That was the rub, after all. What was two thousand
a year, now-a-days? Nothing is anything, now-a-days.
And it takes everything to do almost nothing.
The Ledwiths were just as much pinched
now as they were before they ever heard from Uncle
Oldways. People with unlimited powers of expansion
always are pinched; it is good for them; one of the
saving laws of nature that keeps things decently together.
Yet, in the pink room of a morning,
and in the mellow-tinted drawing-room of an evening,
it was getting to be the subject oftenest discussed.
It was that to which they directed the combined magnetism
of the family will; everything was brought to bear
upon it; Bridget’s going away on Monday morning,
leaving the clothes in the tubs, the strike-price
of coal, and the overcharge of the grocer; Florence’s
music, Helena’s hopeless distress over French
and German; even Desire’s listlessness and fidgets;
most of all Mrs. Megilp’s plans, which were
ripening towards this long coveted end. She and
Glossy really thought they should go this winter.
“It is a matter of economy now;
everybody’s going. The Fargo’s and
the Fayerwerses, and the Hitherinyons have broken all
up, and are going out to stay indefinitely. The
Fayerwerses have been saving up these four years to
get away, there are so many of them, you know; the
passage money counts, and the first travelling; but
after you are over, and have found a place
to settle down in,” then followed
all the usual assertions as to cheap delights and
inestimable advantages, and emancipation from all American
household ills and miseries.
Uncle Oldways came up once in a while
to the house in Shubarton Place, and made an evening
call. He seemed to take apricot-color for granted,
when he got there, as much as he did the plain, old,
unrelieved brown at Mrs. Ripwinkley’s; he sat
quite unconcernedly in the grand easy chair that Laura
wheeled out for him; indeed, it seemed as if he really,
after a manner, indorsed everything by his acceptance
without demur of what he found. But then one must
sit down on something; and if one is offered a cup
of coffee, or anything on a plate, one cannot easily
protest against sea-green china. We do, and we
have, and we wear, and we say, a great many things,
and feel ourselves countenanced and confirmed, somehow, perhaps
excused, because nobody appears surprised
or says anything. But what should they say; and
would it be at all proper that they should be surprised?
If we only thought of it, and once tried it, we might
perhaps find it quite as easy and encouraging, on
the same principle, not to have apricot rep
and sea-green china.
One night Mr. Oldways was with them
when the talk turned eastwardly over the water.
There were new names in the paper, of people who had
gone out in the Aleppo, and a list of Americans
registered at Bowles Brothers,’ among whom were
old acquaintance.
“I declare, how they all keep
turning up there” said Mrs. Ledwith.
“The war doesn’t seem
to make much difference,” said her husband.
“To think how lucky the Vonderbargens
were, to be in Paris just at the edge of the siege!”
said Glossy Megilp. “They came back from
Como just in time; and poor Mr. Washburne had to fairly
hustle them off at last. They were buying silks,
and ribbons, and gloves, up to the last minute, for
absolutely nothing. Mrs. Vonderbargen said it
seemed a sin to come away and leave anything.
I’m sure I don’t know how they got them
all home; but they did.”
Glossy had been staying lately with
the Vonderbargens in New York. She stayed everywhere,
and picked up everything.
“You have been abroad, Mrs.
Scherman?” said Mrs. Ledwith, inquiringly, to
Asenath, who happened to be calling, also, with her
husband, and was looking at some photographs with Desire.
“No, ma’am,” answered
Mrs. Scherman, very promptly, not having spoken at
all before in the discussion. “I do not
think I wish to go. The syphon has been working
too long.”
“The Syphon?”
Mrs. Ledwith spoke with a capital
S in her mind; but was not quite sure whether what
Mrs. Scherman meant might be a line of Atlantic steamers
or the sea-serpent.
“Yes, ma’am. The
emptying back and forth. There isn’t much
that is foreign over there, now, nor very much that
is native here. The hemispheres have got miserably
mixed up. I think when I go ’strange countries
for to see,’ it will have to be Patagonia or
Independent Tartary.”
Uncle Oldways turned round with his
great chair, so as to face Asenath, and laughed one
of his thorough fun digesting laughs, his keen eyes
half shut with the enjoyment, and sparkling out through
their cracks at her.
But Asenath had resumed her photographs
with the sweetest and quietest unconsciousness.
Mrs. Ledwith let her alone after that;
and the talk rambled on to the schools in Munich,
and the Miracle Plays at Oberammergau.
“To think of that invasion!”
said Asenath, in a low tone to Desire, “and
corrupting that into a show, with a run of regular
performances! I do believe they have pulled down
the last unprofaned thing now, and trampled over it.”
“If we go,” said Mrs.
Megilp, “we shall join the Fayerwerses, and
settle down with them quietly in some nice place; and
then make excursions. We shall not try to do
all Europe in three months; we shall choose, and take
time. It is the only way really to enjoy or acquire;
and the quiet times are so invaluable for the lessons
and languages.”
Mrs. Megilp made up her little varnishes
with the genuine gums of truth and wisdom; she put
a beautiful shine even on to her limited opportunities
and her enforced frugalities.
“Mrs. Ledwith, you ought
to let Agatha and Florence go too. I would take
every care of them; and the expense would be so divided carriages,
and couriers, and everything that it would
be hardly anything.”
It is a great opportunity, Mrs. Ledwith said, and sighed.
But it is different with us from what it is with you. We must still be a family
here, with nearly the same expenses. To be sure Desire has done with school, and
she doesnt care for gay society, and Helena is a mere child yet; if it ever
could
And so it went on between the ladies,
while Mr. Oldways and Mr. Ledwith and Frank Scherman
got into war talk, and Bismarck policy, and French
poss no, im-possibilities.
“I don’t think Uncle Oldways
minded much,” said Mrs. Ledwith to Agatha, and
Mrs. Megilp, up-stairs, after everybody had gone who
was to go.
“He never minds anything,” said Agatha.
“I don’t know,”
said Mrs. Megilp, slowly. “He seemed mightily
pleased with what Asenath Scherman said.”
“O, she’s pretty, and
funny; it makes no difference what she says; people
are always pleased.”
“We might dismiss one girl this
winter,” said Mrs. Ledwith, “and board
in some cheap country place next summer. I dare
say we could save it in the year’s round; the
difference, I mean. When you weren’t actually
travelling, it wouldn’t cost more than to have
you here, dress and all.
“They wouldn’t need to have a new thing,”
said Glossy.
“Those people out at Z
want to buy the house. I’ve a great mind
to coax Grant to sell, and take a slice right out,
and send them,” said Mrs. Ledwith, eagerly.
She was always eager to accomplish the next new thing
for her children; and, to say the truth, did not much
consider herself. And so far as they had ever
been able, the Ledwiths had always been rather easily
given to “taking the slice right out.”
The Megilps had had a little legacy
of two or three thousand dollars, and were quite in
earnest in their plans, this time, which had been
talk with them for many years.
“Those poor Fayerwerses!”
said Asenath to her husband, walking home. “Going
out now, after the cheap European living of a dozen
years ago! The ghost always goes over on the
last load. I wonder at Mrs. Megilp. She
generally knows better.”
“She’ll do,” said
Frank Scherman. “If the Fayerwerses stick
anywhere, as they probably will, she’ll hitch
on to the Fargo’s, and turn up at Jerusalem.
And then there are to be the Ledwiths, and their ‘little
slice.’”
“O, dear! what a mess people
do make of living!” said Asenath.
Uncle Titus trudged along down Dorset
Street with his stick under his arm.
“Try ’em! Find ’em
out!” he repeated to himself. “That’s
what Marmaduke said. Try ’em with this, try
’em with that; a good deal, or a little; having
and losing, and wanting. That’s what the
Lord does with us all; and I begin to see He has a
job of it!”
The house was sold, and Agatha and Florence went.
It made home dull for poor Desire,
little as she found of real companionship with her
elder sisters. But then she was always looking
for it, and that was something. Husbands and wives,
parents and children, live on upon that, through years
of repeated disappointments, and never give up the
expectation of that which is somewhere, and which
these relations represent to them, through all their
frustrated lives.
That is just why. It is somewhere.
It turned out a hard winter, in many
ways, for Desire Ledwith. She hated gay company,
and the quiet little circle that she had become fond
of at her Aunt Ripwinkley’s was broken somewhat
to them all, and more to Desire than, among what had
grown to be her chronic discontents, she realized
or understood, by the going away for a time of Kenneth
Kincaid.
What was curious in the happening,
too, he had gone up to “And” to build
a church. That had come about through the Marchbankses’
knowledge of him, and this, you remember, through their
being with the Geoffreys when the Kincaids were first
introduced in Summit Street.
The Marchbankses and the Geoffreys
were cousins. A good many Boston families are.
Mr. Roger Marchbanks owned a good
deal of property in And. The neighborhood wanted
a church; and he interested himself actively and liberally
in behalf of it, and gave the land, three
lots right out of the middle of Marchbanks Street,
that ran down to the river.
Dorris kept her little room, and was
neighborly as heretofore; but she was busy with her
music, and had little time but her evenings; and now
there was nobody to walk home with Desire to Shubarton
Place, if she stayed in Aspen Street to tea. She
came sometimes, and stayed all night; but that was
dreary for Helena, who never remembered to shut the
piano or cover up the canary, or give the plants in
the bay window their evening sprinkle, after the furnace
heat had been drying them all day.
Kenneth Kincaid came down for his
Sundays with Dorris, and his work at the Mission;
a few times he called in at Uncle Oldways’ after
tea, when the family was all together; but they saw
him very seldom; he gave those Sunday evenings mostly
to needed rest, and to quiet talk with Dorris.
Desire might have gone to the Mission
this winter, easily enough, after all. Agatha
and Florence and Glossy Megilp were not by to make
wondering eyes, or smile significant smiles; but there
was something in herself that prevented; she knew
that it would be more than half to get, and
she still thought she had so little to give! Besides,
Kenneth Kincaid had never asked her again, and she
could not go to him and say she would come.
Desire Ledwith began to have serious
question of what life was ever going to be for her.
She imagined, as in our early years and our first
gray days we are all apt to imagine, that she had found
out a good deal that it was not going to be.
She was not going to be beautiful,
or accomplished, or even, she was afraid, agreeable;
she found that such hard work with most people.
She was not ever and that conclusion rested
closely upon these foregoing to be married,
and have a nice husband and a pretty house, and go
down stairs and make snow-puddings and ginger-snaps
of a morning, and have girls staying with her, and
pleasant people in to tea; like Asenath Scherman.
She couldn’t write a book, that,
perhaps, was one of her premature decisions, since
nobody knows till they try, and the books are lying
all round, in leaves, waiting only to be picked up
and put together, or paint a picture; she
couldn’t bear parties, and clothes were a fuss,
and she didn’t care to go to Europe.
She thought she should rather like
to be an old maid, if she could begin right off, and
have a little cottage out of town somewhere, or some
cosy rooms in the city. At least, she supposed
that was what she had got to be, and if that were
settled, she did not see why it might not be begun
young, as well as married life. She could not
endure waiting, when a thing was to be done.
“Aunt Frances,” she said
one day, “I wish I had a place of my own.
What is the reason I can’t? A girl can go
in for Art, and set up a studio; or she can go to
Rome, and sculp, and study; she can learn elocution,
and read, whether people want to be read to or not;
and all that is Progress and Woman’s Rights;
why can’t she set up a home?”
“Because, I suppose, a house
is not a home; and the beginning of a home is just
what she waits for. Meanwhile, if she has a father
and a mother, she would not put a slight on their
home, or fail of her share of the duty in it.”
“But nobody would think I failed
in my duty if I were going to be married. I’m
sure mamma would think I was doing it beautifully.
And I never shall be married. Why can’t
I live something out for myself, and have a place
of my own? I have got money enough to pay my rent,
and I could do sewing in a genteel way, or keep a school
for little children. I’d rather take
in back stairs to wash,” she exclaimed vehemently,
“than wait round for things, and be nothing!
And I should like to begin young, while there might
be some sort of fun in it. You’d like to
come and take tea with me, wouldn’t you, Aunt
Frank?”
“If it were all right that you
should have separate teas of your own.”
“And if I had waffles.
Well, I should. I think, just now, there’s
nothing I should like so much as a little kitchen of
my own, and a pie-board, and a biscuit-cutter, and
a beautiful baking oven, and a Japan tea-pot.”
“The pretty part. But brooms,
and pails, and wash-tubs, and the back stairs?”
“I specified back stairs in
the first place, of my own accord. I wouldn’t
shirk. Sometimes I think that real good old-fashioned
hard work is what I do want. I should like to
find the right, honest thing, and do it, Aunt Frank.”
She said it earnestly, and there were
tears in her eyes.
“I believe you would,”
said Mrs. Ripwinkley. “But perhaps the right,
honest thing, just now, is to wait patiently, with
all your might.”
“Now, that’s good,”
said Desire, “and cute of you, too, that last
piece of a sentence. If you had stopped at ‘patiently,’
as people generally do! That’s what exasperates;
when you want to do something with all your might.
It almost seems as if I could, when you put it so.”
“It is a ‘stump,’ Luclarion would
say.”
“Luclarion is a saint and a
philosopher. I feel better,” said Desire.
She stayed feeling better all that
afternoon; she helped Sulie Praile cut out little
panels from her thick sheet of gray painting-board,
and contrived her a small easel with her round lightstand
and a book-rest; for Sulie was advancing in the fine
arts, from painting dollies’ paper faces in cheap
water colors, to copying bits of flowers and fern
and moss, with oils, on gray board; and she was doing
it very well, and with exquisite delight.
To wait, meant something to wait for;
something coming by and by; that was what comforted
Desire to-day, as she walked home alone in the sharp,
short, winter twilight; that, and the being patient
with all one’s might. To be patient, is
to be also strong; this she saw, newly; and Desire
coveted, most of all, to be strong.
Something to wait for. “He
does not cheat,” said Desire, low down in her
heart, to herself. For the child had faith, though
she could not talk about it.
Something; but very likely not the
thing you have seen, or dreamed of; something quite
different, it may be, when it comes; and it may come
by the way of losing, first, all that you have been
able yet, with a vague, whispering hope, to imagine.
The things we do not know! The
things that are happening, the things that
are coming; rising up in the eastward of our lives
below the horizon that we can yet see; it may be a
star, it may be a cloud!
Desire Ledwith could not see that
out at Westover, this cheery winter night, it was
one of dear Miss Pennington’s “Next Thursdays;”
she could not see that the young architect, living
away over there in the hundred-year-old house on the
side of East Hill, a boarder with old Miss Arabel
Waite, had been found, and appreciated, and drawn
into their circle by the Haddens and the Penningtons
and the Holabirds and the Inglesides; and that Rosamond
was showing him the pleasant things in their Westover
life, her “swan’s nest among
the reeds,” that she had told him of, that
early autumn evening, when they had walked up Hanley
Street together.