NEIGHBORS AND NEXT OF KIN
“I’ll tell you what to
do with them, Luclarion,” said Hazel briskly.
“Teach them to play.”
“Music! Pianners!” exclaimed Luclarion,
dismayed.
“No. Games. Teach
them to have good times. That was the first thing
ever we learnt, wasn’t it, Dine? And we
never could have got along without it.”
“It takes you!”
said Luclarion, looking at Hazel with delighted admiration.
“Does it? Well I don’t
know but it does. May I go, mother? Luclarion,
haven’t you got a great big empty room up at
the top of the house?”
Luclarion had.
“That’s just what it’s
for, then. Couldn’t Mr. Gallilee put up
a swing? And a ‘flying circle’ in
the middle? You see they can’t go out on
the roofs; so they must have something else that will
seem kind of flighty. And I’ll tell
you how they’ll learn their letters. Sulie
and I will paint ’em; great big ones, all colors;
and hang ’em up with ribbons, and every child
that learns one, so as to know it everywhere, shall
take it down and carry it home. Then we will
have marbles for numbers; and they shall play addition
games, and multiplication games, and get the sums
for prizes; the ones that get to the head, you know.
Why, you don’t understand objects, Luclarion!”
Luclarion had been telling them of
the wild little folk of Neighbor Street, and worse,
of Arctic Street. She wanted to do something with
them. She had tried to get them in with gingerbread
and popcorn; they came in fast enough for those; but
they would not stay. They were digging in the
gutters and calling names; learning the foul language
of the places into which they were born; chasing and
hiding in alley-ways; filching, if they could, from
shops; going off begging with lies on their lips.
It was terrible to see the springs from which the
life of the city depths was fed.
“If you could stop it there!”
Luclarion said, and said with reason.
“Will you let me go?”
asked Hazel of her mother, in good earnest.
“’Twon’t hurt her,”
put in Luclarion. “Nothing’s catching
that you haven’t got the seeds of in your own
constitution. And so the catching will be the
other way.”
The seeds of good, to catch
good; that was what Luclarion Grapp believed in, in
those dirty little souls, no, those clean
little souls, overlaid with all outward mire
and filth of body, clothing, speech, and atmosphere,
for a mile about; through which they could no more
grope and penetrate, to reach their own that was hidden
from them in the clearer life beyond, than we can
grope and reach to other stars.
“I will get Desire,” quoth
Hazel, inspired as she always was, both ways.
Running in at the house in Greenley
Street the next Thursday, she ran against Uncle Titus
coming out.
“What now?” he demanded.
“Desire,” said Hazel.
“I’ve come for her. We’re wanted
at Luclarion’s. We’ve got work to
do.”
“Humph! Work? What kind?”
“Play,” said Hazel, laughing.
She delighted to bother and mystify Uncle Titus, and
imagined that she did.
“I thought so. Tea parties?”
“Something like,” said
Hazel. “There are children down there that
don’t know how to grow up. They haven’t
any comfortable sort of fashion of growing up.
Somebody has got to teach them. They don’t
know how to play ‘Grand Mufti,’ and they
never heard of ’King George and his troops.’
Luclarion tried to make them sit still and learn letters;
but of course they wouldn’t a minute longer than
the gingerbread lasted, and they are eating her out
of house and home. It will take young folks,
and week-days, you see; so Desire and I are going.”
And Hazel ran up the great, flat-stepped staircase.
“Lives that have no business
to be,” said Uncle Titus to himself, going down
the brick walk. “The Lord has His own ways
of bringing lives together. And His own business
gets worked out among them, beyond their guessing.
When a man grows old, he can stand still now and then,
and see a little.”
It was a short cross street that Luclarion
lived in, between two great thoroughfares crowded
with life and business, bustle, drudgery, idleness,
and vice. You will not find the name I give it, although
you may find one that will remind you of it, in
any directory or on any city map. But you can
find the places without the names; and if you go down
there with the like errands in your heart, you will
find the work, as she found it, to do.
She heard the noise of street brawls
at night, voices of men and women quarreling in alley-ways,
and up in wretched garrets; flinging up at each other,
in horrible words, all the evil they knew of in each
other’s lives, “away back,”
Luclarion said, “to when they were little children.”
“And what is it,” she
would say to Mrs. Ripwinkley telling her about it,
“that flings it up, and can call it a
shame, after all the shames of years and years?
Except just that that the little children were,
underneath, when the Lord let them He knows
why be born so? I tell you, ma’am,
it’s a mystery; and the nigher you come to it,
the more it is; it’s a piece of hell and a piece
of heaven; it’s the wrastle of the angel and
the dragon; and it’s going on at one end, while
they’re building up their palaces and living
soft and sweet and clean at the other, with everything
hushed up that can’t at least seem right
and nice and proper. I know there’s good
folks there, in the palaces; beautiful folks;
there, and all the way down between; with God’s
love in them, and His hate, that is holy, against
sin; and His pity, that is prayers in them,
for all people and places that are dark; but if they
would come down there, and take hold!
I think it’s them that would, that might have
part in the first resurrection, and live and reign
the thousand years.”
Luclarion never counted herself among
them, those who were to have thrones and
judgments; she forgot, even, that she had gone down
and taken hold; her words came burning-true, out of
her soul; and in the heat of truth they were eloquent.
But I meant to tell you of her living.
In the daytime it was quiet; the gross
evils crept away and hid from the sunshine; there
was labor to take up the hours, for those who did
labor; and you might not know or guess, to go down
those avenues, that anything worse gathered there
than the dust of the world’s traffic that the
lumbering drays ground up continually with their wheels,
and the wind, that came into the city from
far away country places of green sweetness, and over
hills and ponds and streams and woods, flung
into the little children’s faces.
Luclarion had taken a house, one
of two, that fronted upon a little planked court;
aside, somewhat, from Neighbor Street, as that was
a slight remove from the absolute terrible contact
of Arctic Street. But it was in the heart of
that miserable quarter; she could reach out her hands
and touch and gather in, if it would let her, the
wretchedness. She had chosen a place where it
was possible for her to make a nook of refuge, not
for herself only, or so much, as for those to whom
she would fain be neighbor, and help to a better living.
It had been once a dwelling of some
well-to-do family of the days gone by; of some merchant,
whose ventures went out and came in at those wharves
below, whence the air swept up pure, then, with its
salt smell, into the streets. The rooms were fairly
large; Luclarion spent money out of her own little
property, that had been growing by care and saving
till she could spare from it, in doing her share toward
having it all made as sweet and clean as mortar and
whitewash and new pine-boards and paint and paper
could make it. All that was left of the old,
they scoured with carbolic soap; and she had the windows
opened, and in the chimneys that had been swept of
their soot she had clear fires made and kept burning
for days.
Then she put her new, plain furnishings
into her own two down-stairs rooms; and the Gallilees
brought in theirs above; and beside them, she found
two decent families, a German paper-hanger’s,
and that of a carpenter at one of the theatres, whose
wife worked at dressmaking, to take the
rest. Away up, at the very top, she had the wide,
large room that Hazel spoke of, and a smaller one to
which she climbed to sleep, for the sake of air as
near heaven as it could be got.
One of her lower-rooms was her living
and housekeeping room; the other she turned into a
little shop, in which she sold tapes and needles and
cheap calicoes and a few ribbons; and kept a counter
on the opposite side for bread and yeast, gingerbread,
candy, and the like. She did this partly because
she must do something to help out the money for her
living and her plans, and partly to draw the women
and children in. How else could she establish
any relations between herself and them, or get any
permanent hold or access? She had “turned
it all over in her mind,” she said; “and
a tidy little shop with fair, easy prices, was the
very thing, and a part of just what she came down
there to do.”
She made real, honest, hop-raised
bread, of sweet flour that she gave ten dollars a
barrel for; it took a little more than a pint, perhaps,
to make a tea loaf; that cost her three cents; she
sold her loaf for four, and it was better than they
could get anywhere else for five. Then, three
evenings in a week, she had hot muffins, or crumpets,
home-made; (it was the subtle home touch and flavor
that she counted on, to carry more than a good taste
into their mouths, even a dim notion of home sweetness
and comfort into their hearts;) these first, a
quart of flour at five cents, two eggs at a cent apiece,
and a bit of butter, say three cents more, with three
cents worth of milk, made an outlay of fifteen cents
for a dozen and a half; so she sold them for ten cents
a dozen, and the like had never been tasted or dreamed
of in all that region round about; no, nor I dare
almost to say, in half the region round about Republic
Avenue either, where they cannot get Luclarion Grapps
to cook.
The crumpets were cheaper; they were
only bread-sponge, baked on a griddle; they were large,
and light and tender; a quart of flour would make
ten; she gave the ten for seven cents.
And do you see, putting two cents
on every quart of her flour, for her labor, she earned,
not made, that word is for speculators
and brokers, with a barrel of one hundred
and ninety six pounds or quarts, three dollars and
ninety-two cents? The beauty of it was, you perceive,
that she did a small business; there was an eager
market for all she could produce, and there was no
waste to allow a margin for.
I am not a bit of a political economist
myself; but I have a shrewd suspicion that Luclarion
Grapp was, besides having hit upon the initial, individual
idea of a capital social and philanthropic enterprise.
This was all she tried to do at first;
she began with bread; the Lord from heaven began with
that; she fed as much of the multitude as she could
reach; they gathered about her for the loaves; and
they got, consciously or unconsciously, more than
they came or asked for.
They saw her clean-swept floor; her
netted windows that kept the flies out, the clean,
coarse white cotton shades, tacked up, and
rolled and tied with cord, country-fashion, for Luclarion
would not set any fashions that her poor neighbors
might not follow if they would; and her
shelves kept always dusted down; they could see her
way of doing that, as they happened in at different
times, when she whisked about, lightly and nicely,
behind and between her jars and boxes and parcels
with the little feather duster that she kept hanging
over her table where she made her change and sat at
her sewing.
They grew ashamed by degrees, those
coarse women, to come in in their frowsy
rags, to buy her delicate muffins or her white loaves;
they would fling on the cleanest shawl they had or
could borrow, to “cut round to Old Maid Grapp’s,”
after a cent’s worth of yeast, for
her yeast, also, was like none other that could be
got, and would almost make her own beautiful
bread of itself.
Back of the shop was her house-room;
the cheapest and cleanest of carpet, a
square, bound round with bright-striped carpet-binding, laid
in the middle of a clean dark yellow floor; a plain
pine table, scoured white, standing in the middle
of that; on it, at tea-time, common blue and white
crockery cups and plates, and a little black teapot;
a napkin, coarse, but fresh from the fold, laid down
to save, and at the same time to set off, with a touch
of delicate neatness, the white table; a wooden settee,
with a home-made calico-covered cushion and pillows,
set at right angles with the large, black, speckless
stove; a wooden rocking-chair, made comfortable in
like manner, on the other side; the sink in the corner,
clean, freshly rinsed, with the bright tin basin hung
above it on a nail.
There was nothing in the whole place
that must not be, in some shape, in almost the poorest;
but all so beautifully ordered, so stainlessly kept.
Through that open door, those women read a daily sermon.
And Luclarion herself, in
a dark cotton print gown, a plain strip of white about
the throat, even that was cotton, not linen,
and two of them could be run together in ten minutes
for a cent, and a black alpacca apron,
never soiled or crumpled, but washed and ironed when
it needed, like anything else, her hair
smoothly gathered back under a small white half-handkerchief
cap, plain-hemmed, was the sermon alive;
with the soul of it, the inner sweetness and purity,
looking out at them from clear pleasant eyes, and lips
cheery with a smile that lay behind them.
She had come down there just to do
as God told her to be a neighbor, and to let her light
shine. He would see about the glorifying.
She did not try to make money out
of her candy, or her ginger-nuts; she kept those to
entice the little children in; to tempt them to come
again when they had once done an errand, shyly, or
saucily, or hang-doggedly, it made little
difference which to her, in her shop.
“I’ll tell you what it’s
like,” Hazel said, when she came in and up-stairs
the first Saturday afternoon with Desire, and showed
and explained to her proudly all Luclarion’s
ways and blessed inventions. “It’s
like your mother and mine throwing crumbs to make
the pigeons come, when they were little girls, and
lived in Boston, I mean here!”
Hazel waked up at the end of her sentence,
suddenly, as we all do sometimes, out of talking or
thinking, to the consciousness that it was here
that she had mentally got round to.
Desire had never heard of the crumbs
or the pigeons. Mrs. Ledwith had always been
in such a hurry, living on, that she never stopped
to tell her children the sweet old tales of how she
had lived. Her child-life had not ripened
in her as it had done in Frank.
Desire and Hazel went up-stairs and
looked at the empty room. It was light and pleasant;
dormer windows opened out on a great area of roofs,
above which was blue sky; upon which, poor clothes
fluttered in the wind, or cats walked and stretched
themselves safely and lazily in the sun.
“I always do like roofs!”
said Hazel. “The nicest thing in ’Mutual
Friend’ is Jenny Wren up on the Jew’s roof,
being dead. It seems like getting up over the
world, and leaving it all covered up and put away.”
“Except the old clothes,” said Desire.
“They’re washed”
answered Hazel, promptly; and never stopped to think
of the meaning.
Then she jumped down from the window,
along under which a great beam made a bench to stand
on, and looked about the chamber.
“A swing to begin with,”
she said. “Why what is that? Luclarion’s
got one!”
Knotted up under two great staples
that held it, was the long loop of clean new rope;
the notched board rested against the chimney below.
“It’s all ready!
Let’s go down and catch one! Luclarion,
we’ve come to tea,” she announced, as
they reached the sitting-room. “There’s
the shop bell!”
In the shop was a woman with touzled
hair and a gown with placket split from gathers to
hem, showing the ribs of a dirty skeleton skirt.
A child with one garment on, some sort of
woolen thing that had never been a clean color, and
was all gutter-color now, the woman holding
the child by the hand here, in a safe place, in a way
these mothers have who turn their children out in the
street dirt and scramble without any hand to hold.
No wonder, though, perhaps; in the strangeness and
unfitness of the safe, pure place, doubtless they
feel an uneasy instinct that the poor little vagabonds
have got astray, and need some holding.
“Give us a four-cent loaf!”
said the woman, roughly, her eyes lowering under crossly
furrowed brows, as she flung two coins upon the little
counter.
Luclarion took down one, looked at
it, saw that it had a pale side, and exchanged it
for another.
“Here is a nice crusty one,”
she said pleasantly, turning to wrap it in a sheet
of paper.
“None o’ yer gammon!
Give it here; there’s your money; come along,
Crazybug!” And she grabbed the loaf without a
wrapper, and twitched the child.
Hazel sat still. She knew there
was no use. But Desire with her point-black determination,
went right at the boy, took hold of his hand, dirt
and all; it was disagreeable, therefore she thought
she must do it.
“Don’t you want to come and swing?”
she said.
“ yer swing!
and yer imperdence! Clear out! He’s
got swings enough to home! Go to ,
and be , you -!”
Out of the mother’s mouth poured
a volley of horrible words, like a hailstorm of hell.
Desire fell back, as from a blinding
shock of she knew not what.
Luclarion came round the counter, quite calmly.
“Ma’am,” she said,
“those words won’t hurt her.
She don’t know the language. But you’ve
got God’s daily bread in your hand; how can you
talk devil’s Dutch over it?”
The woman glared at her. But
she saw nothing but strong, calm, earnest asking in
the face; the asking of God’s own pity.
She rebelled against that, sullenly;
but she spoke no more foul words. I think she
could as soon have spoken them in the face of Christ;
for it was the Christ in Luclarion Grapp that looked
out at her.
“You needn’t preach.
You can order me out of your shop, if you like.
I don’t care.”
“I don’t order you out.
I’d rather you would come again. I don’t
think you will bring that street-muck with you, though.”
There was both confidence and command
in the word like the “Neither do I condemn thee:
go, and sin no more.” It detached the street-muck
from the woman. It was not she; it was
defilement she had picked up, when perhaps she could
not help it. She could scrape her shoes at the
door, and come in clean.
“You know a darned lot about
it, I suppose!” were the last words of defiance;
softened down, however, you perceive, to that which
can be printed.
Desire was pale, with a dry sob in
her throat, when the woman had gone and Luclarion
turned round.
“The angels in heaven know;
why shouldn’t you?” said Luclarion.
“That’s what we’ve got to help.”
A child came in afterwards, alone;
with an actual clean spot in the middle of her face,
where a ginger-nut or an acid drop might go in.
This was a regular customer of a week past. The
week had made that clean spot; with a few pleasant
and encouraging hints from Luclarion, administered
along with the gingerbread.
Now it was Hazel’s turn.
The round mouth and eyes, with expectation
in them, were like a spot of green to Hazel, feeling
with her witch-wand for a human spring. But she
spoke to Desire, looking cunningly at the child.
“Let us go back and swing,” she said.
The girl’s head pricked itself up quickly.
“We’ve got a swing up-stairs,”
said Hazel, passing close by, and just pausing.
“A new one. I guess it goes pretty high;
and it looks out of top windows. Wouldn’t
you like to come and see?”
The child lived down in a cellar.
“Take up some ginger-nuts, and
eat them there,” said Luclarion to Hazel.
If it had not been for that, the girl
would have hung back, afraid of losing her shop treat.
Hazel knew better than to hold out
her hand, at this first essay; she would do that fast
enough when the time came. She only walked on,
through the sitting-room, to the stairs.
The girl peeped, and followed.
Clean stairs. She had never trodden
such before. Everything was strange and clean
here, as she had never seen anything before in all
her life, except the sky and the white clouds overhead.
Heaven be thanked that they are held over us, spotless,
always!
Hazel heard the little feet, shuffling,
in horrible, distorted shoes, after her, over the
steps; pausing, coming slowly but still starting again,
and coming on.
Up on the high landing, under the
skylight, she opened the door wide into the dormer-windowed
room, and went in; she and Desire, neither of them
looking round.
Hazel got into the swing. Desire
pushed; after three vibrations they saw the ragged
figure standing in the doorway, watching, turning its
head from side to side as the swing passed.
“Almost!” cried Hazel,
with her feet up at the window. “There!”
She thrust them out at that next swing; they looked
as if they touched the blue.
“I can see over all the chimneys,
and away off, down the water! Now let the old
cat die.”
Out again, with a spring, as the swinging
slackened, she still took no notice of the child,
who would have run, like a wild kitten, if she had
gone after her. She called Desire, and plunged
into a closet under the eaves.
“I wonder what’s here!” she exclaimed.
“Rats!”
The girl in the doorway saw the dark,
into which the low door opened; she was used to rats
in the dark.
“I don’t believe it,”
says Hazel; “Luclarion has a cut, a great big
buff one with green eyes. She came in over the
roofs, and she runs up here nights. I shouldn’t
wonder if there might be kittens, though, one
of these days, at any rate. Why! what a place
to play ‘Dare’ in! It goes way round,
I don’t know where! Look here, Desire!”
She sat on the threshold, that went
up a step, over the beam, and so leaned in. She
had one eye toward the girl all the time, out of the
shadow. She beckoned and nodded, and Desire came.
At the same moment, the coast being
clear, the girl gave a sudden scud across, and into
the swing. She began to scuff with her slipshod,
twisted shoes, pushing herself.
Hazel gave another nod behind her
to Desire. Desire stood up, and as the swing
came back, pushed gently, touching the board only.
The girl laughed out with the sudden
thrill of the motion. Desire pushed again.
Higher and higher, till the feet reached
up to the window.
“There!” she cried; and
kicked an old shoe off, out over the roof. “I’ve
lost my shoe!”
“Never mind; it’ll be down in the yard,”
said Hazel.
Thereupon the child, at the height
of her sweep again, kicked out the other one.
Desire and Hazel, together, pushed
her for a quarter of an hour.
“Now let’s have ginger-cakes,”
said Hazel, taking them out of her pocket, and leaving
the “cat” to die.
Little Barefoot came down at that,
with a run; hanging to the rope at one side, and dragging,
till she tumbled in a sprawl upon the floor.
“You ought to have waited,” said Desire.
“Poh! I don’t never
wait!” cried the ragamuffin rubbing her elbows.
“I don’t care.”
“But it isn’t nice to tumble round,”
suggested Hazel.
“I ain’t nice,” answered
the child, and settled the subject.
“Well, these ginger-nuts are,” said Hazel.
“Here!”
“Have you had a good time?”
she asked when the last one was eaten, and she led
the way to go down-stairs.
“Good time! That ain’t
nothin’! I’ve had a reg’lar
bust! I’m comin’ agin’; it’s
bully. Now I must get my loaf and my shoes, and
go along back and take a lickin’.”
That was the way Hazel caught her first child.
She made her tell her name, Ann
Fazackerley, and promise to come on Saturday
afternoon, and bring two more girls with her.
“We’ll have a party,”
said Hazel, “and play Puss in the Corner.
But you must get leave,” she added. “Ask
your mother. I don’t want you to be punished
when you go home.”
“Lor! you’re green!
I ain’t got no mother. An’ I always
hooks jack. I’m licked reg’lar when
I gets back, anyway. There’s half a dozen
of ’em. When ’tain’t one, it’s
another. That’s Jane Goffey’s bread;
she’s been a swearin’ after it this hour,
you bet. But I’ll come, see
if I don’t!”
Hazel drew a hard breath as she let
the girl go. Back to her crowded cellar, her
Jane Goffeys, the swearings, and the lickings.
What was one hour at a time, once or twice a week,
to do against all this?
But she remembered the clean little
round in her face, out of which eyes and mouth looked
merrily, while she talked rough slang; the same fun
and daring, nothing worse, were
in this child’s face, that might be in another’s
saying prettier words. How could she help her
words, hearing nothing but devil’s Dutch around
her all the time? Children do not make the language
they are born into. And the face that could be
simply merry, telling such a tale as that, what
sort of bright little immortality must it be the outlook
of?
Hazel meant to try her hour.
This is one of my last chapters.
I can only tell you now they began, these
real folks, the work their real living led
them up to. Perhaps some other time we may follow
it on. If I were to tell you now a finished story
of it, I should tell a story ahead of the world.
I can show you what six weeks brought
it to. I can show you them fairly launched in
what may grow to a beautiful private charity, an
“Insecution,” a broad social
scheme, a millennium; at any rate, a life
work, change and branch as it may, for these girls
who have found out, in their girlhood, that there
is genuine living, not mere “playing pretend,”
to be done in the world. But you cannot, in little
books of three hundred pages, see things through.
I never expected or promised to do that. The
threescore years and ten themselves, do not do it.
It turned into regular Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons. Three girls at first, then
six, then less again, sometimes only one
or two; until they gradually came up to and settled
at, an average of nine or ten.
The first Saturday they took them
as they were. The next time they gave them a
stick of candy each, the first thing, then Hazel’s
fingers were sticky, and she proposed the wash-basin
all round, before they went up-stairs. The bright
tin bowl was ready in the sink, and a clean round
towel hung beside; and with some red and white soap-balls,
they managed to fascinate their dirty little visitors
into three clean pairs of hands, and three clean faces
as well.
The candy and the washing grew to
be a custom; and in three weeks’ time, watching
for a hot day and having it luckily on a Saturday,
they ventured upon instituting a whole bath, in big
round tubs, in the back shed-room, where a faucet
came in over a wash bench, and a great boiler was
set close by.
They began with a foot-paddle, playing
pond, and sailing chips at the same time; then Luclarion
told them they might have tubs full, and get in all
over and duck, if they liked; and children who may
hate to be washed, nevertheless are always ready for
a duck and a paddle. So Luclarion superintended
the bath-room; Diana helped her; and Desire and Hazel
tended the shop. Luclarion invented a shower-bath
with a dipper and a colander; then the wet, tangled
hair had to be combed, a climax which she
had secretly aimed at with a great longing, from the
beginning; and doing this, she contrived with carbolic
soap and a separate suds, and a bit of sponge, to give
the neglected little heads a most salutary dressing.
Saturday grew into bath-day; soap-suds
suggested bubbles; and the ducking and the bubbling
were a frolic altogether.
Then Hazel wished they could be put
into clean clothes each time; wouldn’t it do,
somehow?
But that would cost. Luclarion
had come to the limit of her purse; Hazel had no purse,
and Desire’s was small.
“But you see they’ve got
to have it,” said Hazel; and so she went to
her mother, and from her straight to Uncle Oldways.
They counted up, she and
Desire, and Diana; two little common suits, of stockings,
underclothes, and calico gowns, apiece; somebody to
do a washing once a week, ready for the change; and
then “those horrid shoes!”
“I don’t see how you can
do it,” said Mrs. Ripwinkley. “The
things will be taken away from them, and sold.
You would have to keep doing, over and over, to no
purpose, I am afraid.”
“I’ll see to that,”
said Luclarion, facing her “stump.”
“We’ll do for them we can do for; if it
ain’t ones, it will be tothers. Those that
don’t keep their things, can’t have ’em;
and if they’re taken away, I won’t sell
bread to the women they belong to, till they’re
brought back. Besides, the washing kind
of sorts ’em out, beforehand. ’Taint
the worst ones that are willing to come, or to send,
for that. You always have to work in at an edge,
in anything, and make your way as you go along.
It’ll regulate. I’m living
there right amongst ’em; I’ve got a clew,
and a hold; I can follow things up; I shall have a
‘circle;’ there’s circles everywhere.
And in all the wheels there’s a moving spirit;
you ain’t got to depend just on yourself.
Things work; the Lord sees to it; it’s His
business as much as yours.”
Hazel told Uncle Titus that there
were shoes and stockings and gowns wanted down in
Neighbor Street; things for ten children; they must
have subscriptions. And so she had come to him.
The Ripwinkleys had never given Uncle
Titus a Christmas or a birthday present, for fear
they should seem to establish a mutual precedent.
They had never talked of their plans which involved
calculation, before him; they were terribly afraid
of just one thing with him, and only that one, of
anything most distantly like what Desire Ledwith called
“a Megilp bespeak.” But now Hazel
went up to him as bold as a lion. She took it
for granted he was like other people, “real
folks;” that he would do what must
be done.
“How much will it cost?”
“For clothes and shoes for each
child, about eight dollars for three months, we guess,”
said Hazel. “Mother’s going to pay
for the washing!”
“Guess? Haven’t you calculated?”
“Yes, sir. ‘Guess’
and ‘calculate’ mean the same thing in
Yankee,” said Hazel, laughing.
Uncle Titus laughed in and out, in
his queer way, with his shoulders going up and down.
Then he turned round, on his swivel
chair, to his desk, and wrote a check for one hundred
dollars.
“There. See how far you can make that go.”
“That’s good,” said
Hazel, heartily, looking at it; “that’s
splendid!” and never gave him a word of personal
thanks. It was a thing for mutual congratulations,
rather, it would seem; the “good” was
just what they all wanted, and there it was. Why
should anybody in particular be thanked, as if anybody
in particular had asked for anything? She did
not say this, or think it; she simply did not think
about it at all.
And Uncle Oldways again liked
it.
There! I shall not try, now,
to tell you any more; their experiences, their difficulties,
their encouragements, would make large material for
a much larger book. I want you to know of the
idea, and the attempt. If they fail, partly, if
drunken fathers steal the shoes, and the innocent
have to forfeit for the guilty, if the
bad words still come to the lips often, though Hazel
tells them they are not “nice,” and
beginning at the outside, they are in a fair way of
learning the niceness of being nice, if
some children come once or twice, and get dressed
up, and then go off and live in the gutters again
until the clothes are gone, are these real
failures? There is a bright, pure place down there
in Neighbor Street, and twice a week some little children
have there a bright, pure time. Will this be
lost in the world? In the great Ledger of God
will it always stand unbalanced on the debit side?
If you are afraid it will fail, will
be swallowed up in the great sink of vice and misery,
like a single sweet, fresh drop, sweet only while
it is falling, go and do likewise; rain
down more; make the work larger, stronger; pour the
sweetness in faster, till the wide, grand time of
full refreshing shall have come from the presence of
the Lord!
Ada Geoffrey went down and helped.
Miss Craydocke is going to knit scarlet stockings
all winter for them; Mr. Geoffrey has put a regular
bath-room in for Luclarion, with half partitions, and
three separate tubs; Mrs. Geoffrey has furnished a
dormitory, where little homeless ones can be kept
to sleep. Luclarion has her hands full, and has
taken in a girl to help her, whose board and wages
Rachel Froke and Asenath Scherman pay. A thing
like that spreads every way; you have only to be among,
and one of Real Folks.
Desire, besides her work in Neighbor
Street, has gone into the Normal School. She
wants to make herself fit for any teaching; she wants
also to know and to become a companion of earnest,
working girls.
She told Uncle Titus this, after she
had been with him a month, and had thought it over;
and Uncle Titus agreed, quite as if it were no real
concern of his, but a very proper and unobjectionable
plan for her, if she liked it.
One day, though, when Marmaduke Wharne who
had come this fall again to stay his three days, and
talk over their business, sat with him
in his study, just where they had sat two years and
a little more ago, and Hazel and Desire ran up and
down stairs together, in and out upon their busy Wednesday
errands, Marmaduke said to Titus,
“Afterwards is a long time,
friend; but I mistrust you have found the comfort,
as well as the providence, of ‘next of kin?’”
“Afterwards is a long
time,” said Titus Oldways, gravely; “but
the Lord’s line of succession stretches all
the way through.”
And that same night he had his other old friend, Miss
Craydocke, in; and he brought two papers that he had ready, quietly out to be
signed, each with four names: Titus Oldways, by itself, on the one side; on
the other,
“RACHEL FROKE,
MARMADUKE WHARNE,
KEREN-HAPPUCH CRAYDOCKE.”
And one of those two papers which
are no further part of the present story, seeing that
good old Uncle Titus is at this moment alive and well,
as he has a perfect right, and is heartily welcome
to be, whether the story ever comes to a regular winding
up or not was laid safely away in a japanned
box in a deep drawer of his study table; and Marmaduke
Wharne put the other in his pocket.
He and Titus knew. I myself guess,
and perhaps you do; but neither you nor I, nor Rachel,
nor Keren-happuch, know for certain; and it is no
sort of matter whether we do or not.
The “next of kin” is a
better and a deeper thing than any claim of law or
register of bequest can show. Titus Oldways had
found that out; and he had settled in his mind, to
his restful and satisfied belief, that God, to the
last moment of His time, and the last particle of
His created substance, can surely care for and order
and direct His own.
Is that end and moral enough for a
two years’ watchful trial and a two years’
simple tale?