"How about "other folks" dust," Kate? Do you remember?"
"There"s only one place, I guess, after all," said Kate, "where you can be shut up with nothing but your own dust!"
"Sharper than ever, Kate Sencerbox! I guess you _do_ get rubbed up!"
"Mr. Stalworth is there to-night," said Bel. "He tells as good stories as he writes. And they"ve been talking about Tyndall"s Essays, and the spectroscope. Mrs. Scherman asked questions that I don"t believe she"d any particular need of answers to, herself; and she stopped me once when I was going out of the room for something.
I knew by her look that she wanted me to hear."
"If they want you to hear, why don"t they ask you to sit down and hear comfortably?" said Elise Mokey, who had got her social science--with a _little_ warp in it--from Boffin"s Bower.
"Because it"s my place to stand, at that time," said Bel, stoutly; "and I shouldn"t be comfortable out of my place. I haven"t earned a place like Mrs. Scherman"s yet, or married a man that has earned it for me. There are proper things for everybody. It isn"t always proper for Mrs. Scherman to sit down herself; or for Mr. Scherman to keep his hat on. It"s the knowing what"s proper that sets people really up; it _never_ puts them down!"
"There"s one thing," said Kate Sencerbox. "You might be parlor people all your days, and not get into everybody"s parlor, either.
There"s an up-side and a down-side, all the way through, from top to bottom. The very best chance, for some people, if they only knew it, into some houses, would be up through the kitchen."
"Never mind," said Bel, putting sugar into Mary Pinfall"s second cup of coffee. "I"ve got the notion of those lines, Kate,--I was going to tell you,--into my head at last, I do believe. Red-hot iron makes a rainbow through a prism, like any light; but iron-_steam_ stops a stripe of the color; and every burning thing does the same way,--stops its own color when it shines through its own vapor; there! Let"s hold on to that, and we"ll go all over it another time.
There"s a piece about it in last month"s Scribner."
"What _are_ you talking about?" said Elise Mokey.
"The way they"ve been finding out what the sun is made of. By the black lines across the rainbow colors. It"s a telegraph; they"ve just learned to read it."
"But what do _you_ care?"
"I guess it"s put there as much, for me as anybody," said Bel. "I don"t think we should ever pick up such things, though, among the basting threads at Fillmer & Bylles". They"re lying round here, loose; in books and talk, and everything. They"re going to have Crambo this evening, Kate. After these dishes are washed, I mean to try my hand at it. They were laughing about one Mrs. Scherman made last time; they couldn"t quite remember it. I"ve got it. I picked it up among the sweepings. I shall take it in to her by and by."
Bel went to her work-basket as she spoke, and lifting up some calico pieces that lay upon it, drew from underneath two or three folded bits of paper.
"This is it," she said, selecting one, and coming back and reading.
(Do you see, let me ask in a hurried parenthesis,--how the tone of this household might easily have been a different one, and pervaded differently its auxiliary department? How, in that case, it might have been nothing better than a surrept.i.tious sc.r.a.p of silk or velvet, that would have lain in Bel Bree"s work-basket, with a story about it of how, and for what gayety, it had been made; a sc.r.a.p out of a life that these girls could only gossip and wonder about,--not partic.i.p.ate, and with self-same human privilege and faculty delight in; and yet the only sc.r.a.p that--"out of the sweepings"--they could have picked up? _There_ is where, if you know it, dear parlor people, the up-side, by just living, can so graciously and generously be always helping the down.)
Bel read:--
""What of that second great fire that was prophesied to come before Christmas?"--"Peaches.""
"You"ve got to get that word into the answer, you see and it hasn"t the very least thing to do with it! Now see:--
"A prophet, after the event, No startling wisdom teaches; A second fire would scarce be sent To gratify the morbid bent That for fresh horror reaches.
But, friend, do tell me why you went And mixed it up with _peaches_!"
It"s great fun! And sometimes it"s lovely, real poetry. Kate, you"ve got to give me some words and questions, I"m going to take to Crambo."
"You"ll have to mix it up with dish-washing," said Elise.
"Dish-washing and dust,--you can"t get rid of them!"
"We do, though!" said Kate, alertly, jumping up and beginning to fetch the plates and cups from the dumb-waiter. "Here, Bel!" And she tossed three or four long, soft, clean towels over to her from the shelf beside the china.
"And about that dusting," she went on, after the noise of the hot water rushing from the faucet was over, and she began dropping the things carefully down through the cloud of steam into the great pan full of suds, and fishing them up again with a fork and a little mop,--"about the dusting, I didn"t finish. It"s a work of art to dust Mrs. Scherman"s parlor. Don"t you think there"s a pleasure in handling and touching up and setting out all those pretty things?
Don"t they get to be a part of our having, too? Don"t I take as much comfort in her fernery as she does? I know every little green and woolly loop that comes up in it. It"s the only sense there is in things. There"s a picture there, of cows coming home, down a green lane, and the sun striking through, and lighting up the gravel, and a patch of green gra.s.s, and the red hair on the cows" necks. You think you just catch it _coming_, suddenly, through the trees, when you first look up at it. And you go right into a little piece of the country, and stand there. Mr. Scherman doesn"t own that lane, or those cows, though he bought the picture. All he owns is what he gets by the signs; and I get that, every day, for the dusting! There are things to be earned and shared where people _live_, that you can"t earn in the sewing-shops."
"That"s what Bel said. Well, I"m glad you like it. Sha"n"t I wipe up some of those cups?"
"They"re all done now," said Bel, piling them together.
In fifteen minutes after their own tea was ended, the kitchen was in order again; the dumb-waiter, with its freight, sent up to the china closet; the brown linen cloth and the napkins folded away in the drawer, and the white-topped table ready for evening use. Bel Bree had not been brought up in a New England farm-house, and seen her capable stepmother "whew round," to be hard put to it, now, over half a dozen cups and tumblers more or less.
"We must go," said Elise Mokey. "I"ve got the b.u.t.tons to sew on to those last night-gowns of Miss Ledwith"s. I want to carry them back to-morrow."
"You"re lucky to sew for her," said Bel. "But you see we all have to do for somebody, and I"d as lief it would be teacups, for my part, as b.u.t.tons."
Bel Bree"s old tricks of rhyming were running in her head. This game of Crambo--a favorite one with the Schermans and their bright little intimate circle--stirred up her wits with a challenge. And under the wits,--under the quick mechanic action of the serving brain,--thoughts had been daily crowding and growing, for which these mere mental facilities were waiting, the ready instruments.
I have said that Bel Bree was a born reformer and a born poet; and that the two things go together. To see freshly and clearly,--to discern new meaning in old living,--living as old as the world is; to find by instinct new and better ways of doing, the finding of which is often only returning to the heart and simplicity of the old living before it _was_ old with social circ.u.mventions and needed to be fresh interpreted; these are the very heavenly gift and office of illumination and leadership. Just as she had been made, and just where she had been put,--a girl with the questions of woman-life before her in these days of restless asking and uncertain reply,--with her lot cast here, in this very crowding, fermenting, aspiring, great New England metropolis, in the hour of its most changeful and involved experience,--she brought the divine talisman of her nature to bear upon the nearest, most practical point of the wide tangle with which it came in contact. And around her in this right place that she had found and taken, gathered and wrought already, by effluence and influence, forces and results that gather and work about any nucleus of life, however deep hidden it may be in a surrounding deadness. All things,--creation itself,--as Asenath had said, must begin in spots; and she and Bel Bree had begun a fair new spot, in which was a vitality that tends to organic completeness, to full establishment, and triumphant growth.
Upon Bel herself reflected quickly and surely the beneficent action of this life. She was taking in truly, at every pore. How long would it have been before, out of the hard coa.r.s.e limits in which her one line of labor and a.s.sociation had first placed her, she would have come up into such an atmosphere as was here, ready made for her to breathe and abide in? To help make also; to stand at its practical mainspring, and keep it possible that it should move on.
The talk, the ideas of the day, were in her ears; the books, the periodicals of the day were at hand, and free for her to avail herself of. The very fun at Mrs, Scherman"s tea-table was the sort of fun that can only sparkle out of culture. There was a grace that her aptness caught, and that was making a lady of her.
"I"ll give in," said Elise Mokey, "that you"re getting _style_; though I can"t tell how it is either. It ain"t in your calico dresses, nor the doing up of your hair."
Perhaps it was a good deal in the very simplifying of these from the exaggerated imitations of the shop and street, as well as in the tone of all the rest with which these inevitably fell into harmony.
But I want to tell you about Bel"s kitchen Crambo. I want to show you how what is in a woman, in heart and mind, springs up and shows itself, and may grow to whatever is meant for it, out of the quietest background of homely use.
She brought out pencil and paper, and made Kate write question slips and detached words.
"I feel just tingling to try," she said. "There"s a kind of dancing in my head, of things that have been there ever so long. I believe I shall make a poem to-night. It"s catching, when you"re predisposed; and it"s partly the spring weather, and the sap coming up. "Put a name to it," Katie! Almost anything will set me off."
Kate wrote, on half a dozen sc.r.a.ps; then tossed them up, and pushed them over for Bel to draw.
"How do you like the city in the spring?" was the question; and the word, suggested by Kate"s work at the moment, was,--"Hem."
Bel put her elbows on the table, and her hands up against her ears.
Her eyes shone, as they rested intent upon the two penciled bits.
The link between them suggested itself quickly and faintly; she was grasping at an elusive something with all the fine little quivering brain-tentacles that lay hold of spiritual apprehension.
Just at that moment the parlor bell rang.
"I"ll go," she said. "You keep to your sewing. It"s for the nursery, I guess, and I"ll do my poem up there."
She caught up pencil and paper, and the other fragment also,--Mrs.
Scherman"s own rhyme about the "peaches."
Mrs. Scherman met her at the parlor door.
"I"m sorry to interrupt you," she said; "but the baby is stirring.
Could you, or Kate, go up and try to hush her off again? If I go, she"ll keep me."