"It"s all such bosh!" said Kenneth Kincaid, flinging down a handful of papers. "I"ve no right, I solemnly think, to help such stuff out into the world! A man can"t take hold anywhere, it seems, without s.m.u.tting his fingers!"
Kenneth Kincaid was correcting proof for a publisher. What he had to work on this morning was the first chapters of a flimsy novel.
"It isn"t even confectionery," said he. "It"s terra alba and cochineal. And when it comes to the sensation, it will be benzine for whiskey. Real things are bad enough, for the most part, in this world; but when it comes to sham fictions and adulterated poisons, Dorris, I"d rather help bake bread, if it were an honest loaf, or make strong shoes for laboring men!"
"You don"t always get things like that," said Dorris. "And you know you"re not responsible. Why will you torment yourself so?"
"I was so determined not to do anything but genuine work; work that the world wanted; and to have it come down to this!"
"Only for a time, while you are waiting."
"Yes; people must eat while they are waiting; that"s the--devil of it! I"m not swearing, Dorris, dear; it came truly into my head, that minute, about the Temptation in the Wilderness." Kenneth"s voice was reverent, saying this; and there was an earnest thought in his face.
"You"ll never like anything heartily but your Sunday work."
"That"s what keeps me here. My week-day work might be wanted somewhere else. And perhaps I ought to go. There"s Sunday work everywhere."
"If you"ve found one half, hold on to it;" said Dorris. "The other can"t be far off."
"I suppose there are a score or two of young architects in this city, waiting for a name or a chance to make one, as I am. If it isn"t here for all of them, somebody has got to quit."
"And somebody has got to hold on," repeated Dorris. "You are morbid, Kent, about this "work of the world.""
"It"s overdone, everywhere. Fifth wheels trying to hitch on to every coach. I"d rather be the one wheel of a barrow."
"The Lord is Wheelwright, and Builder," said Dorris, very simply.
"You _are_ a wheel, and He has made you; He"ll find an axle for you and put you on; and you shall go about his business, so that you shall wonder to remember that you were ever leaning up against a wall. Do you know, Kentie, life seems to me like the game we used to play at home in the twilight. When we shut our eyes and let each other lead us, until we did not know where we were going, or in what place we should come out. I should not care to walk up a broad path with my eyes wide open, now. I"d rather feel the leading. To-morrow always makes a turn. It"s beautiful! People don"t know, who _never_ shut their eyes!"
Kenneth had taken up a newspaper.
"The pretenses at doing! The dodges and go-betweens that make a sham work between every two real ones! There"s hardly a true business carried on, and if there is, you don"t know where or which. Look at the advertis.e.m.e.nts. Why, they cheat with their very tops and faces!
See this man who puts in big capitals: "Lost! $5,000! $1,000 reward!" and then tells you, in small type, that five thousand dollars are lost every year by breaking gla.s.s and china, that his cement will mend! What business has he to cry "Wolf!" to the hindrance of the next man who may have a real wolf to catch? And what business has the printer, whom the next man will pay to advertise his loss, to help on a lie like this beforehand? I"m only twenty-six years old, Dorris, and I"m getting ashamed of the world!"
"Don"t grow hard, Kenneth. "The Son of Man came not to condemn the world, but to save it." Let"s each try to save our little piece!"
We are listening across the street, you see; between the windows in the rain; it is strange what chords one catches that do not catch each other, and were never planned to be played together,--by the _players_.
Kenneth Kincaid"s father Robert had been a ship-builder. When shipping went down in the whirlpool of 1857, Robert Kincaid"s building had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children little beside their education, which he thanked G.o.d was secured, and a good repute that belonged to their name, but was easily forgotten in the crowd of young and forward ones, and in the strife and scramble of a new business growth.
Between college and technical studies Kenneth had been to the war.
After that he had a chance to make a fortune in Wall Street. His father"s brother, James, offered to take him in with him to buy and sell stocks and gold, to watch the market, to touch little unseen springs, to put the difference into his own pocket every time the tide of value shifted, or could be made to seem to shift. He might have been one of James R. Kincaid and Company. He would have none of it. He told his uncle plainly that he wanted real work; that he had not come back from fighting to--well, there he stopped, for he could not fling the truth in his uncle"s face; he said there were things he meant to finish learning, and would try to do; and if n.o.body wanted them of him he would learn something else that was needed. So with what was left to his share from his father"s little remnant of property, he had two years at the Technological School, and here he was in Boston waiting. You can see what he meant by real work, and how deep his theories and distinctions lay. You can see that it might be a hard thing for one young man, here or there, to take up the world on these terms now, in this year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-nine.
Over the way Desire Ledwith was beginning again, after a pause in which we have made our little cha.s.see.
"I know a girl," she said, "who has got a studio. And she talks about art, and she knows styles, and who has done what, and she runs about to see pictures, and she copies things, and she has little plaster legs and toes and things hanging round everywhere. She thinks it is something great; but it"s only Mig, after all.
Everything is. Florence Migs into music. And I won"t Mig, if I never do anything. I"m come here this morning to darn stockings." And she pulled out of her big waterproof pocket a bundle of stockings and a great white ball of darning cotton and a wooden egg.
"There is always one thing that is real," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, gently, "and that shows the way surely to all the rest."
"I know what you mean," said Desire, "of course; but they"ve mixed that all up too, like everything else, so that you don"t know where it is. Glossy Megilp has a velvet prayer-book, and she blacks her eyelashes and goes to church. We"ve all been baptized, and we"ve learned the Lord"s Prayer, and we"re all Christians. What is there more about it? I wish, sometimes, they had let it all alone. I think they vaccinated us with religion, Aunt Frank, for fear we should take it the natural way."
"Thee is restless," said Rachel Froke, tying on her gray cloak. "And to make us so is oftentimes the first thing the Lord does for us. It was the first thing He did for the world. Then He said, "Let there be light!" In the meantime, thee is right; just darn thy stockings."
And Rachel went.
They had a nice morning, after that, "leaving frets alone," as Diana said. Diana Ripwinkley was happy in things just as they were. If the sun shone, she rejoiced in the glory; if the rain fell, it shut her in sweetly to the heart of home, and the outside world grew fragrant for her breathing. There was never anything in her day that she could spare out of it, and there were no holes in the hours either.
"Whether she was most bird or bee, it was hard to tell," her mother said of her; from the time she used to sweep and dust her garret baby-house along the big beams in the old house at Homesworth, and make little cheeses, and set them to press in wooden pill-boxes from which she had punched the bottoms out, till now, that she began to take upon herself the daily freshening of the new parlors in Aspen Street, and had long lessons of geometry to learn, whose dry demonstrations she set to odd little improvised recitatives of music, and chanted over while she ran up and down putting away clean linen for her mother, that Luclarion brought up from the wash.
As for Hazel, she was only another variation upon the same sweet nature. There was more of outgo and enterprise with her. Diana made the thing or the place pleasant that she was in or doing. Hazel sought out new and blessed inventions. "There was always something coming to the child that wouldn"t ever have come to no one else,"
Luclarion said. "And besides that, she was a real "Witch Hazel;" she could tell where the springs were, and what"s more, where they warn"t."
Luclarion Grapp would never have pleaded guilty to "dropping into poetry" in any light whatsoever; but what she meant by this was not exactly according to the letter, as one may easily see.
IX.
HAZEL"S INSPIRATION.
What was the use of "looking," unless things were looked at? Mrs.
Ledwith found at the end of the winter that she ought to give a party. Not a general one; Mrs. Ledwith always said "not a general one," as if it were an exception, whereas she knew better than ever to undertake a general party; her list would be _too_ general, and heterogeneous. It would simply be a physical, as well as a social, impossibility. She knew quant.i.ties of people separately and very cordially, in her easy have-a-good-time-when-you-can style, that she could by no means mix, or even gather together. She picked up acquaintances on summer journeys, she accepted civilities wherever she might be, she asked everybody to her house who took a fancy to her, or would admire her establishment, and if she had had a spring cleaning or a new carpeting, or a furbishing up in any way, the next thing was always to light up and play it off,--to try it on to somebody. What were houses for? And there was always somebody who ought to be paid attention to; somebody staying with a friend, or a couple just engaged, or if nothing else, it was her turn to have the sewing-society; and so her rooms got aired. Of course she had to air them now! The drawing-room, with its apricot and coffee-brown furnishings, was lovely in the evening, and the crimson and garnet in the dining-room was rich and cozy, and set off brilliantly her show of silver and cut-gla.s.s; and then, there was the new, real, sea-green China.
So the party was had. There were some people in town from New York; she invited them and about a hundred more. The house lit up beautifully; the only pity was that Mrs. Ledwith could not wear her favorite and most becoming colors, buff and chestnut, because she had taken that family of tints for her furniture; but she found a lovely shade of violet that would hold by gas-light, and she wore black Fayal lace with it, and white roses upon her hair. Mrs.
Treweek was enchanted with the brown and apricot drawing-room, and wondered where on earth they had got that particular shade, for "my dear! she had ransacked Paris for hangings in just that perfect, soft, ripe color that she had in her mind and never could hit upon."
Mrs. MacMichael had pushed the grapes back upon her plate to examine the pattern of the bit of china, and had said how lovely the coloring was, with the purple and pale green of the fruit. And these things, and a few more like them, were the residuum of the whole, and Laura Ledwith was satisfied.
Afterward, "while they were in the way of it," Florence had a little _musicale_; and the first season in Shubarton Place was over.
It turned out, however, as it did in the old rhyme,--they shod the horse, and shod the mare, and let the little colt go bare. Helena was disgusted because she could not have a "German."
"We shall have to be careful, now that we have fairly settled down,"
said Laura to her sister; "for every bit of Grant"s salary will have been taken up with this winter"s expenses. But one wants to begin right, and after that one can go on moderately. I"m good at contriving, Frank; only give me something to contrive with."
"Isn"t it a responsibility," Frank ventured, "to think what we shall contrive _for_?"
"Of course," returned Mrs. Ledwith, glibly. "And my first duty is to my children. I don"t mean to encourage them to reckless extravagance; as Mrs. Megilp says, there"s always a limit; but it"s one"s duty to make life beautiful, and one can"t do too much for home. I want my children to be satisfied with theirs, and I want to cultivate their tastes and accustom them to society. I can"t do _everything_ for them; they will dress on three hundred a year apiece, Agatha and Florence; and I can a.s.sure you it needs management to accomplish that, in these days!"
Mrs. Ripwinkley laughed, gently.
"It would require management with us to get rid of that, upon ourselves."
"O, my dear, don"t I tell you continually, you haven"t waked up yet?
Just rub your eyes a while longer,--or let the girls do it for you,--and you"ll see! Why, I know of girls,--girls whose mothers have limited incomes, too,--who have been kept plain, actually _plain_, all their school days, but who must have now six and eight hundred a year to go into society with. And really I wouldn"t undertake it for less, myself, if I expected to keep up with everything. But I must treat mine all alike, and we must be contented with what we have. There"s Helena, now, crazy for a young party; but I couldn"t think of it. Young parties are ten times worse than old ones; there"s really no _end_ to the expense, with the German, and everything. Helena will have to wait; and yet,--of course, if I could, it is desirable, almost necessary; acquaintances begin in the school-room,--society, indeed; and a great deal would depend upon it. The truth is, you"re no sooner born, now-a-days, than you have to begin to keep up; or else--you"re dropped out."
"O, Laura! do you remember the dear little parties our mother used to make for us? From four till half-past eight, with games, and tea at six, and the fathers looking in?"
"And c.o.c.kles, and mottoes, and printed cambric dresses, and milk and water! Where are the children, do you suppose, you dear old Frau Van Winkle, that would come to such a party now?"